---
title: "Always be curious"
description: "Curiosity built everything from a Tandy 1000SX to the basement home lab, and keeping it alive takes conscious daily effort."
url: "https://michael.zazon.us/notes/always-be-curious"
published: "2025-11-13T12:00:00-05:00"
kind: "take"
subject: "leadership"
tags: ["careers"]
---
I've been poking around with computers since the BBS days. I started with a [Tandy 1000SX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000) with no magnetic storage, eventually had a fleet of budget Pentiums running [Slackware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware) in my basement, graduated to rack mounts and co-locations, and eventually turned it into a career in cloud architecture. Hell, I ended up co-writing a book, the [AWS Cookbook](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1492092606), about how curious builders can use the cloud to do really amazing stuff.

Curiosity got me here, it's just how I'm wired.. I'll be honest, it does take conscious effort to stay that way daily in my adulthood, and it is an effort I look forward to every day with my family and my own hobbies. In my own hobbies, [always be building](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/a-cloud-architects-habits-applied-at-home) became the motto, but it's all rooted in this insatiable curiosity. Curiosity is the why.. building is the how.. they are both parts of my story. One without the other and the momentum just fizzles out.

I still run Linux machines in my basement to this day, and they are the foundation for my home lab. Yes, I rent cloud compute for things like ML model training and other side quests, but self-hosting in my basement is just home to me, no pun intended.

This is where the magic happens. My home lab is the home of [the heat pump telemetry hunt](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/the-mitsubishi-heat-pump-telemetry-hunt), [the fast roaming tests](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/walking-around-for-fast-roamings-sake), and many other fun projects. It's also where the "always be building" motto is most easily misinterpreted as a nightly obligation.

Always doesn't mean every night.. it means a steady habit. If the baby is napping on me, I'll pick up a Claude Code session and fix some bugs in my Home Assistant plugins or push an update to my e-ink firmware. Maybe cruise the ESP32 subreddit for inspiration on future projects.

I'm genuinely excited to write about what I've been working on because it turns fleeting thoughts and productivity blasts into embedded, durable knowledge.. there is science to this. Writing as you experiment and learn beds in those concepts, and so does sharing with your peers, colleagues, strangers, internet passers-by, and AI agents stopping by here. Psychologists call the first part the [generation effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_effect), where information you produce yourself is remembered better than information you only read, and the [testing effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_effect) shows that pulling something back out of memory makes it stick longer than reviewing it again.

In [Why I built this site](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/why-i-built-this-site) I talked about my decision to start writing here, and this post is about the underlying reason for that. Here are the next projects I'm going to write up, as that's where my curiosity is currently pointed.

I'm super excited to write about my Aviary project, an extension of my [BirdNET-Go](https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go) deployment, my e-ink management software called Pigment, and my agentic framework forked from NanoClaw that I run fleets of agents in, powered by Claude Code and tmux. More strategic takes on technology and my day job. How I see the bleeding edge of this technology shaping humanity, and the exciting new things we need to adapt to. Book reviews, rants, raves, anecdotes, write-ups, write-downs, and more.

Since this space is literally just a rendered extension of my Obsidian vault, I can easily bring new posts here with minimal friction to share. See [How this site is built](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/how-this-site-is-built) for more on that.

Stay curious & keep building.

_Edited on 2026-10-10 to link Walking around for fast roaming's sake, The Mitsubishi heat pump telemetry hunt and My cloud architect habits at home._