Notes from the infrastructure bench
Practical write-ups on networking, automation and AI systems engineering.
September 27, 2026
The $5 Chip on My Desk Doesn't Know Anything — And That's the Design
I wanted a thing on my desk that answers questions. The obvious chip is a $5 ESP32-S3 — so I went to find out what it can actually do, and ended up building the brain somewhere else entirely.
esp32 edge-ai hardware llm
September 22, 2026
If You Can't Monitor It, You Don't Own It
How I built uptime monitoring that survives the failure it's watching — Uptime Kuma on a separate node, a 20-line health gate as a dead man's switch, and alerts that route through n8n.
monitoring uptime-kuma n8n self-hosting
September 12, 2026
n8n in Managed Services: Automating the Grind
How I put n8n to work on the repetitive 30% of managed-services work — rotating passwords, chasing disk space, and the ticket queue nobody wants to read.
automation n8n managed services api