I’ve had a list for years. Not a bucket list. More of a “things I keep meaning to build but life keeps disagreeing” list.
Android apps. Home Assistant addons. WordPress plugins that do exactly one thing instead of forty things badly. The kind of stuff that has no business case, no target audience, and no roadmap. Just a person with a homelab, too many VMs, and an increasingly unreasonable opinion about how software should behave.
I never built most of it. Not because I couldn’t imagine it, I could imagine it in embarrassing detail, but because learning to actually ship it was a different problem entirely. And that problem kept losing to the day job.
Then AI showed up and changed the math.
I want to be clear: this is not a “the robots replaced me” story. My actual work, the courses, the workshops, the uncomfortable conversations about how humans behave in organizations, is not going anywhere. AI is not great at being sarcastic in front of a room of senior managers. Yet.
What changed is that I can now sit down on a Saturday, have an actual technical conversation with a model that doesn’t get bored, and ship something by Sunday. Something that works. Something I’d actually use.
So that’s what this section is. A record of what comes out of those Saturdays. Home Assistant addons I run on my own setup. Android apps for my Nextcloud stack. Plugins that exist because the existing ones annoyed me.
Some of it might be useful to you. Most of it was built because I wanted it to exist. That’s the honest version.
If you want to see what’s actually been shipped, everything lives on my GitHub. Fair warning: it all works, but I occasionally forget to update the changelog, or I push something public before remembering to push the actual commits first; because sometimes the excitement of shipping overtakes the discipline of shipping properly.
You’ve been warned.
If that sounds like your kind of rabbit hole, keep an eye on this section. No newsletter. No launch sequence. Just updates when there’s something worth updating.
PS: Updates from the Lab won’t land in your inbox; that’s a conscious choice, not an oversight. If you want to follow along, the RSS feed has you covered. Old school, just like the tech stack.
