The Dispatch

Homelab builds, creative hobbies, and making things for fun. · View all

Blast Radius: Why Infrastructure Teams Build Tools

Infrastructure teams build tools because their blast radius is enormous. When your work touches every application in the organization, the leverage of a good tool (or the damage of a bad one) scales differently than it does for an application team.

leadership infrastructure engineering-culture career

Work From Home Ergonomics: The Office I've Built Over Time

I didn't build my home office all at once. It evolved piece by piece over a few years, driven by actual pain points rather than aspirational Pinterest boards. Here's what I'm running, what I'd buy again, and what I'm still evaluating.

remote-work self-care infrastructure projects

The Homelab as Creative Outlet: Why I Keep Building Things Nobody Asked For

The homelab isn't about saving money on cloud hosting. It's about having a space where I can build, break, and iterate without a ticket, a timeline, or a stakeholder.

homelab creative self-care infrastructure

Palworld 1.0 Dedicated Server: A Docker Homelab Build on Ubuntu 26

Palworld hit 1.0 this week and I wanted back in. A Proxmox VM, an Ubuntu 26 template, Docker Compose, and about an hour of troubleshooting DNS quirks later, I had a dedicated server running in the basement.

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Keep Your Hobbies Unmonetized

The moment you start thinking about ROI on a hobby, you've turned something you love into something you owe. I've watched it happen with photography, copywriting, and smoking meat, and the pattern is always the same.

self-care creative growth

Minecraft, Hackathons, and the Case for Unstructured Creativity

My kid builds redstone contraptions with no spec and no deadline. My engineers build their best prototypes under the same conditions. The pattern isn't a coincidence.

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