February 2026
Roles All the Way Down
The roles declared in Terraform were designed to feed Ansible. Ansible was built to stand up k3s. This is how a three-node cluster assembles itself from a single playbook run.
Read more →Notes
Operational notes
Short write-ups from real systems, documenting decisions, trade-offs, and what I would do differently next time.
February 2026
From Click-Ops to Roles: Terraforming My Proxmox Platform
I automated forgetting how to create VMs. A shift from manual provisioning to declarative, role-based platform thinking on Proxmox.
Read more →January 2026
Self-Hosted GitLab CI/CD: Building My Own Deployment Platform
How I set up GitLab CE with automated pipelines on my homelab—and what I learned the hard way about SSL termination, reverse proxies, and infrastructure design.
Read more →January 2026
Designing Business Operations That Don't Rely on Heroics
Why MSP environments reward restoration over prevention, and how to design operations that fix root causes without heroics.
Read more →December 2025
Year-end notes: homelab resolutions and the backlog I am finally tackling
A late December reset: observability across the stack, agentic workflows, self-healing, and the certifications I am chasing in the new year.
Read more →December 2025
CI/CD runners on GitLab CE: a small win worth celebrating
I stood up my own GitLab CE runners and automated deployments without leaning on an off the shelf service.
Read more →November 2025
Reinventing a National Non-Profit: Delivering Transformation Through People, Systems and Shared Purpose
An inside look at how I led a £1M organisational transformation programme, balancing governance, culture, technology and collaboration to deliver lasting impact.
Read more →October 2025
Beyond the Hypervisor: Architecting the Self-Sufficient Stack (Gitea, Vaultwarden, Uptime Kuma)
The next phase of the homelab: moving from core infrastructure to essential services. How Gitea replaced GitHub, why Uptime Kuma is non-negotiable, and the security shift with Vaultwarden.
Read more →October 2025
The Platform Mindset
How building a self-hosted homelab reshaped how I think about reliability, risk, and operational discipline.
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