Retrospective

TL;DR Busy week. Three CVE patches shipped on the same day. OpenClaw stabilized with OpenRouter support and a cost exporter. The Wiki.js fork with Mermaid 11 went live after clearing a Trivy scan. PiKey — a Raspberry Pi that pretends to be a Bluetooth keyboard — shipped as a side project. A self-hosted GitHub Actions cache server cut CI restore times from minutes to seconds. And a Reddit comment defending “I use Claude to manage my infrastructure” turned into five new blog posts and a documentation sprint. ...

TL;DR One month ago, I had three empty Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q mini PCs and a Proxmox installer USB. Today, the cluster runs 8 Kubernetes nodes, 15+ applications, full observability with Prometheus and Grafana, AI-powered alert analysis, self-hosted CI/CD, 10GbE networking, and a 3D printer fabricating custom hardware. Total hardware cost: under $800. This post traces the entire journey, day by day, including the things that went wrong. ...

TL;DR Over the last six posts, I’ve documented converting Jellyfin from a single-process media server into a two-replica, PostgreSQL-backed, sticky-session-coordinated deployment on k3s. Five of six failover tests passed cleanly. The key result: zero-downtime failover — killing a pod doesn’t take down the service. Users on the surviving replica see no interruption; displaced users reconnect in seconds. Node maintenance no longer kills Jellyfin for the household. But this project isn’t finished, and some problems can’t be solved with this architecture. This final post is an honest inventory of what’s still broken, what was deferred, and what the path forward looks like. ...