Field notes since 2010

Notes from a homelab, a workshop, and a lot of tinkering.

I’m Thomas, a software engineer in Switzerland. When a project takes me a few weekends to figure out, like a WireGuard hub, a Talos cluster or a laser-cut panorama, I write it up here.

Skyline from Bellalui, traced by Panowood

Recent writing

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Browser SSH Bastion with Short-Lived Certificates

19 min readhomelab

A small web SSH bastion: log in with Keycloak, pick a host, and get a terminal in the browser with a fresh SSH certificate valid for about two minutes. Every session is recorded into a tamper-evident audit ledger.

A Design System I Did Not Have to Design

8 min readmeta

I am a software engineer, not a designer. Asking an AI to turn my three websites into a design system gave me tokens, CSS, Vue components, a Hugo module and even a wall-panel theme that every new project can just use.

DNS as Code with DNSControl

5 min readhomelab

How the zones for inf3.ch, inf3.xyz and schwery.me are declared with DNSControl, kept in Git and deployed to Route53 on merge.

A Home Lab on Talos and ArgoCD

7 min readhomelab

Nine years after the first cluster, the home lab runs on Talos Linux, everything above the nodes is deployed by ArgoCD, and storage comes from TrueNAS.

A WireGuard Hub with Ansible

11 min readhomelab

All my sites dial out to a small public server acting as a WireGuard hub, with frp for public ingress. This is how its Ansible repository is organised.

Archive

31 posts since 2010