At work I keep producing engineering diagrams and the occasional deck. They end up in whatever tool is closest — a whiteboard app here, a slides app there — never consistent, never durable, always one-shot.
I wanted two things: a tool that runs locally, and output that looks the same every single time. So I spent two days teaching coding agents to drive a canvas app, and shipped it as tldraw-canvas-kit.
A Slack thread about our climbing AI bill, plus word that per-user usage limits were landing soon, sent me to check what I was actually spending on Claude Code. The answer was that I had no idea.
The cost only showed up after the fact, in a dashboard I never opened. So I built a gauge instead. My terminal footer now reads out the session's vitals on every render, and the whole thing is one shell script.
A Python service I work on did something that shouldn't be possible. It wrote a directory full of files, turned around to upload them, and found nothing. The files were right there — ls saw them from another terminal.
The upload logged success. Zero files. No exception. Digging into why took me through three separate layers of the stack — none of which would tell me what actually happened — and a paper trail going back to 2015 that almost nobody has read.
I spent months writing posts for this blog. Each one went live on the site, got maybe three readers (one of them me checking the RSS feed), and sat there in peace.
Then I started copy-pasting the same content to dev.to manually — fixing broken image paths, stripping out MkDocs-specific markdown, re-pasting. Every. Single. Post.
The third time I did it, I wrote a Python script instead. That script became a CI pipeline. That pipeline became the subject of this post.1
I used the default macOS Terminal for years and thought that was just how terminals look.
Then I saw someone else's — proper font, syntax highlighting, a prompt that actually tells you something — and realized mine looked like a hospital monitor from the 90s.
My TV spends more time idle than playing content. And every idle minute, Google TV shows me the same curated AI art or Google Photos memories — things I did not choose, do not control, and cannot change.
I wanted my own screensaver. 4K anime art from Wallhaven, video loops from MoeWalls — playing on my TV, not streamed from a cloud service I never asked for.1
Ohara had been running quietly under my desk for weeks. Jellyfin streamed movies. Suwayomi downloaded manga chapters overnight. The server did its job without complaint, invisible and silent.
But I wanted more. I wanted it to talk back.
I had an old PC lying around — one of those machines you keep meaning to throw out but never do. It was slow, loud, and completely useless for modern computing. No one was going to browse the web on it, let alone run any real software.
Then it hit me: I could turn it into a server.
