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Dev, Travel, Blogging

Over a decade of progressive professional software development experience in conjunction with more than two decades as a hobbyist developer has pushed me to reduce the burden of support and cost of delivery by writing highly-maintainable software of the highest caliber.

This blog is intended to be a personal collection of experiences/rants, journaling to tech related, things and other things that may be appropriate to share in a blog.

Best of 2025: Part 2

Self Care and Non-Technical

Posted on January 5, 2026

The theme of this part is Self Care and Non-Technical things. These are some of the non-work/technical related things that I found/did/stood out last year. [Read More]
Tags:
- self-care
- personal-growth
- wellness
- mental-health
- mindfulness
- meditation
- tea
- exercise
- fitness
- injury-recovery
- sports-leagues
- whirlyball
- walking
- hiking
- trails
- reading
- audiobooks
- digital-minimalism
- slow-living
- life-optimization
Best Of 2025

Part 1 of 3: Technical and Things I bought

Posted on January 2, 2026

I haven’t done a “best of” list on my blog, but I’ve seen a lot of interesting posts from other bloggers. This is my review of 2025 and what I personally enjoyed or things that stuck out to me. This will be a highly focused, but not a comprehensive, list.... [Read More]
Tags:
- best-of-2025
- year-in-review
- personal-tech
- developer-life
- self-hosting
- homelab
- home-automation
- zigbee
- opnsense
- networking
- privacy
- open-source
- gRPC
- ci-cd
- gitlab
- llms
- artificial-intelligence
- productivity
- earbuds
- smart-home
Beyond Single Commands: SDKMan's Hidden Environment File Feature

The automated way of switching to virtual environments in the JDK

Posted on September 25, 2025

SDKMan is a tool designed to help developers manage JDK versions within their development environment. Born from the GVM (Groovy Version Manager), it has evolved into a comprehensive SDK versioning system supporting many languages within the Java ecosystem. [Read More]
Tags:
Finding The Owner of An Open Port

lsof doesn't always give you what you're looking for

Posted on September 18, 2025

Under Linux, and BSD systems, in order to find out the owner of a port, the first advice usually given is to use: [Read More]
Tags:
- linux
- networking
- troubleshooting
- lsof
- ports
- port-ownership
- k3s
- firewall
- iptables
- port-forwarding
- system-administration
- server-management
- command-line
- diagnostics
- security
- nmap
- process-id
- unix
- bsd
Web Serial: The Only Reason I’ll Admit JavaScript Isn’t All Bad

But most of it is.

Posted on July 22, 2025

My relationship with Javascript hasn’t been a great one. I like JavaScript in the context of what it was created for: a client language for web pages. It beats the idea of mixing and matching Javascript and VBScript. I’ve had quite a lot of issues with JavaScript, its weird frameworks,... [Read More]
Tags:
- javascript
- webserial
- firmware
- flashing
- esphome
- esp32
- zigbee
- home-assistant
- embedded
- usb
- serial
- chrome
- web-development
- package-management
- python
- iot
- hardware
- developer-tools
6 Features You Should Enable On A New OPNsense Installation

Just installed OPNSense? Start here.

Posted on July 15, 2025

Recently, I replaced my consumer router with a custom OPNSense build to handle routing for my home network. It’s been quite an adventure in learning about DNS, routing, aggressive firewall rules, and more details about networking. As a software engineer, this hasn’t been one of the stronger sets of my... [Read More]
Tags:
How to Ask Questions About YouTube Videos Using Open-WebUI & Ollama (All locally)

Posted on July 3, 2025

Ever wanted to ask a question on a Youtube video and didn’t want to watch the whole 1hr video? Same here. With Open-WebUI and Ollama - you can. Even better: It can be done locally and fairly efficiently. [Read More]
Tags: