Flask

TL;DR Cardboard is a TCG price tracker that monitors sealed product prices across 10 trading card games. It scrapes TCGPlayer and eBay using a three-tier strategy: pure API calls for bulk data, headless Selenium for product pages, and non-headless Selenium with a virtual display for sites that actively detect headless browsers. The scrapers run as Kubernetes Jobs on the same k3s cluster from Cluster Genesis. A Flask dashboard with Chart.js renders historical price data, profit/loss calculations, and portfolio tracking. All scraping is intentionally rate-limited to match normal human browsing patterns – the goal is polite data collection, not stress testing someone else’s infrastructure. ...

TL;DR The digital signage system was pulling weather from OpenWeatherMap, calendar events from Google Calendar, and device status from MQTT – three separate API keys, three separate failure modes. Home Assistant already had all of this data. I built an HA proxy service that exposes weather, forecasts, calendar events, temperature sensors, and arbitrary entity queries through a single Flask API backed by the Home Assistant REST API. Five new endpoints replaced three external dependencies. I also added API key authentication with role-based access control, wrote 37 tests, fixed MQTT addressing after a VLAN migration, and fought through 6 CI/CD fixes to get the pipeline deploying on self-hosted ARC runners. ...

TL;DR Today I migrated Digital Signage — an Angular SPA backed by 7 Flask microservices, an MQTT broker, and PostgreSQL — from a development environment to the k3s cluster. This is the most complex application on the cluster so far, and deploying it taught me a lot about managing multi-service applications in Kubernetes. The Application Digital Signage started as a side project back in May 2025, designed to drive informational displays on Raspberry Pi kiosk devices. It evolved over the months into a surprisingly complex system: ...