Technical

Overview Most of the posts in this series so far have been “here’s how I built X.” This one’s different. It’s about something I built, used for a while, and then mostly walked away from: a Kubernetes cluster running Talos . This isn’t a “Kubernetes is bad” post. It’s a “here’s what it was actually like to run it at home, and why I ended up somewhere simpler” post. The short version: I moved from a Talos-based Kubernetes cluster to a single Proxmox host running a mix of LXC containers and VMs, with Dokploy and Docker Compose handling application deployment. ...

Overview I love the convenience of a monorepo for my homelab. Having my NixOS configs, blog, and custom apps in one place makes cross-project changes trivial. However, it creates a challenge: how do I share specific projects on GitHub without exposing my entire private infrastructure? The solution I’ve landed on uses git subtree to split off specific directories into their own public repositories. In this post, I’ll show how I moved from manual syncing with a Justfile to fully automated “Sync on Push” using OneDev . ...

The Debate Nobody Wins Ask ten engineers whether to use a monorepo and you will get eleven opinions. The polyrepo crowd will tell you that separate repos mean clear ownership, independent versioning, and small focused histories. The monorepo crowd will point at Google, Meta, and Microsoft and say: if it scales there, it scales anywhere. Both camps are right about something. And both camps tend to argue past the thing that actually matters: what is the right fit for your situation? ...

Overview Managing a fleet of NixOS machines can quickly become a manual chore if you’re still running nixos-rebuild switch from your local machine. In my homelab, I’ve moved towards a “hands-off” infrastructure where every change committed to the main branch of my monorepo is automatically built and deployed. This post covers how I use NixOS Flakes in platform/nixos, OneDev for CI/CD, and Colmena for the final deployment “push”. The Infrastructure Stack My setup revolves around three main components: ...

Overview Before writing anything else on this blog, it felt right to write about the blog itself. By the time you’re reading this post, it has already gone through the exact pipeline described below: written in Obsidian , pushed to a git repo, built into a static site, packaged into a container, and deployed to dpall.dev without me touching a server. The goal was simple: writing should be the only manual step. Everything after “commit” should happen on its own. ...