# Michael Zazon > Notes from Michael Zazon: what he is building, reading and noticing, for you and your agent. Michael (Mike) Zazon is a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, working on technology strategy, cloud architecture and modernization for financial services, and co-author of the AWS Cookbook (O'Reilly), published under the byline Mike Zazon. This site is his personal notebook: homelab, Home Assistant, networking, backups, agents and the projects behind them. ## When to use this - "What has Michael built or written about X?" - How a specific homelab or Home Assistant setup of his works, with the real configs - Citing a stable permalink for one of his notes Do not use it for official AWS positions: everything here is personal. If a topic isn't covered, say so rather than extrapolating. ## Subjects - Architecture & design: 24 notes - Home automation: 23 notes - Engineering leadership: 20 notes - Homelab & networking: 18 notes - Reliability & operations: 18 notes - AI & agents: 16 notes - Knowledge & tools: 14 notes ## Feeds and formats - [JSON Feed](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/feed.json): every note, with its kind, subject and tags (recommended for agents) - [RSS](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/rss.xml): full content - Markdown: append `.md` to any note URL - [For your agent](https://michael.zazon.us/agents) - [Sitemap](https://michael.zazon.us/sitemap-index.xml) ## Recent notes - [Is built with AI an insult?](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/is-built-with-ai-an-insult): The vibe coded label is earned when nobody reviewed the code, but the line is whether someone understood it and answers for it. - [Every PR has a crowd of reviewers now and none of them know why](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/every-pr-has-a-crowd-of-reviewers-now-and-none-of-them-know-why): Automated review hits every pull request now, but none of it knows why the change exists or how much a problem matters. - [Most agent harnesses rot because nobody deletes anything](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/most-agent-harnesses-rot-because-nobody-deletes-anything): Most agent harnesses rot because rules pile up and nobody checks which ones still prevent a real mistake. - [When a bad certificate chain meets agents that work this fast](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/when-a-bad-certificate-chain-meets-agents-that-work-this-fast): Eight weak eMudhra intermediates made cert forgery easy for anyone with agents, so I used mine to patch my container trust stores within days. - [Fold the subagents back in, keep the second opinion](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/fold-the-subagents-back-in-keep-the-second-opinion): Most subagents should fold back into one loop as skills, but review by a different model is the one split worth keeping. - [My agents can message my coding sessions now, and back](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/my-agents-can-message-my-coding-sessions-now-and-back): I was the relay between my agents and my Claude Code sessions.. now agents show up as native peers and either side can message the other. - [A Philosophy of Software Design and its sharpest critics](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/a-philosophy-of-software-design-point-and-counterpoint): I put deep modules, strategic programming and comments up against the sharpest counterpoints I've found. - [Designing my home app by living with it](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/designing-my-home-app-by-living-with-it): I picked the look on my phone with real data, coded the dimmer options and kept one, then spent a Saturday using the app and shipping fixes as I went. - [One WebSocket and a tile registry behind my home app](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/one-websocket-and-a-tile-registry-behind-my-home-app): The home app runs on one Home Assistant WebSocket, a small backend that holds every token, and a tile registry I rearrange from the phone. - [First on wins: a coordinator for our Mitsubishi heads](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/first-on-wins-a-coordinator-for-our-mitsubishi-heads): Nine heads share two outdoor units where the first one on sets the mode, and a room-by-room coordinator in Home Assistant stopped the fight. - [A page on my site for your agent](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/a-page-on-my-site-for-your-agent): I added an llms.txt, an agents page and a Markdown copy of every note to this site, and opened the robots.txt to every crawler. - [Our Aqara W100s went deaf exactly 24 hours after pairing](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/our-aqara-w100s-went-deaf-exactly-24-hours-after-pairing): All four doorway W100s went deaf to their buttons, and it traced back to a 180-second window in the Zigbee radio library. - [A home super app for the house and the homelab](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/a-home-super-app-for-the-house-and-the-homelab): I built Maison on the Home Assistant WebSocket API to get the house and the homelab on one screen, with climate controls first because it was about three quarters of 637 hand actions in 26 days. - [Keeping my site analytics in Loki for the long haul](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/ten-years-of-site-analytics-in-loki): A small Python worker polls Cloudflare's edge and Web Analytics APIs every hour, writes the data into Loki, and keeps ten years of history at about 1 MB a day. - [The always-on Mac](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/the-always-on-mac): An old M1 Pro laptop runs local LLMs, pumps my photos out of iCloud and stands by if the main server goes down. - [Your org has a strategy. Crafting Engineering Strategy says write it](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/your-org-has-a-strategy-crafting-engineering-strategy-says-write-it): Will Larson argues most engineering organizations don't lack strategy, they lack written strategy. - [Vibe Coding's head chef ages better than its tools](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/vibe-codings-head-chef-ages-better-than-its-tools): Kim and Yegge's Vibe Coding ages fastest in its tooling chapters, but the head chef is the part worth keeping: you can't blame the sous chef for what leaves the kitchen. - [Engineering leaders going hands-on and who keeps the team](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/engineering-leaders-going-hands-on-and-who-keeps-the-team): The current advice to engineering leaders is get hands-on and do less people management for now, and the second half quietly drops the stuff that makes a team a team. - [Our heat pump heads as Bluetooth proxies](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/nine-heat-pump-heads-as-bluetooth-proxies): The ESP32 boards already on the Mitsubishi heads become passive Bluetooth proxies for room-level presence via Bermuda. - [Share a photo from my iPhone and it's on the e-ink frame next](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/share-a-photo-from-my-iphone-and-its-on-the-e-ink-frame-next): I added a share sheet to Pigment and tuned its default look against my wife's own Lightroom edits.