Michael Zazon

Notes

What I'm building, reading and noticing, for you and your agents.

Activity

One square per day

133 notes on 133 days, Oct 2025 to Nov 2026

Busiest month
October 2026 30
Longest run
28 days in a row
Since
Oct 29, 2025

Dated index

133 notes

133 of 133 notes · All kinds · All subjects

  1. 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.

    AI & agents · Take

  8. 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.

    Home automation · Build log · Maison 3

  11. 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.

    Knowledge & tools · Build log

  13. 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.

    Home automation · Build log · Maison 1

  14. Keeping my site analytics in Loki for the long haul

    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.

    Reliability & operations · Build log

  15. 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.

    Homelab & networking · Build log

  17. Vibe Coding's 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.

    AI & agents · Book notes

  19. Our heat pump heads as Bluetooth proxies

    The ESP32 boards already on the Mitsubishi heads become passive Bluetooth proxies for room-level presence via Bermuda.

    Home automation · Build log · CN105 4

  22. My cloud architect habits at home

    I hold my homelab to the same production standards I practice as a cloud architect, on a strict budget of money and time.

    Homelab & networking · Take

  24. A doorway thermostat for our Mitsubishi heads

    An Aqara W100 by the door gives each Mitsubishi head the real room temperature and a two-way control on the wall for about $30 per device.

    Home automation · Build log · CN105 3

  25. The Mitsubishi heat pump telemetry hunt

    I scanned all 256 CN105 info codes and found nothing, then swept all nine heads and found energy and runtime counters on four of them.

    Home automation · Build log · CN105 2

  26. Input-bound teams and where AI savings actually show up

    Whether AI shrinks a team depends on what the work waits on: input-bound teams get cheaper, but engineering backlogs never run out, so cutting engineers is really a roadmap decision.

    Engineering leadership · Take

  27. My Obsidian setup and how I use it

    My Obsidian vault is a folder of plain markdown where my notes, tasks and agents all work together.

    Knowledge & tools · Build log

  29. Hot water at the tap with Home Assistant

    What local control of our Navien unlocked: scheduled recirculation, an all-night override and a hot-water prime for the washer.

    Home automation · Build log · Navien on an ESP32 2

  32. Running an agent fleet like a small team

    Each agent has a role, changes go through review gates, and a fix proposal that sat unapproved about 13 hours taught me what those gates are for.

    AI & agents · Take

  33. Class-only SVGs that render everywhere

    The diagrams on this site are SVGs with no colors or fonts. The site themes them, Obsidian renders them on my phone, and a shared lint keeps both honest.

    Knowledge & tools · Build log

  38. My whole dev setup fits in my pocket

    My Claude Code sessions run on the server, so with Mosh and tmux I can check in and answer a permission prompt from my phone.

    Knowledge & tools · Build log

  46. Forcing every DNS query through AdGuard (and the LG TV)

    My LG TV was quietly reaching ad and tracking hosts about 470 times a week past my blocklist, so I blocked them per-client and then made every plain DNS query on the LAN go through AdGuard.

    Homelab & networking · Build log · Home networking 7

  48. My backup strategy

    I pull my iMessages, Gmail and iCloud Photos home to my own server, then copy them to two local disks and an offsite the server can't delete.

    Reliability & operations · Build log · Backups 1

  49. The AI argument at work is really about who's on call

    The fight over AI-written code inside a company comes down to who gets paged, and the old 'you build it, you run it' rule would make the argument more honest pretty quickly.

    Reliability & operations · Take

  55. Leak to closed valve in 68 ms

    My leak and smoke sensors sat dark for a week with zero alerting, so I built the safety automations from scratch and the first live water test closed the main in 68 ms.

    Home automation · Build log

  56. Config history for a live Home Assistant

    Home Assistant's live config now writes its own history every hour, and the first version reported success while pushing nothing.

    Home automation · Build log

  59. Naming things in Home Assistant

    Relocating smoke detectors kicked off a whole-house naming cleanup, from hardware IDs on labels to ghost devices and a rename skill that scans consumers first.

    Home automation · Build log

  61. BirdNET listening in the backyard

    The first evening's fixes took it from 2 detections to 120+, but the second model was loaded and never routed audio, so every detection for 22 hours was BirdNET only.

    Homelab & networking · Build log · Birds 2

  62. BirdNET near the nature preserve

    A cheap mic near a large nature preserve feeds two bird ID models, and the detections show up on screens around the house.

    Homelab & networking · Build log · Birds 1

  63. The Value Flywheel Effect from the CIO's chair

    Cloud waste rose to 29% this year and regulators want exit plans, so the Wardley map in this 2022 book lands harder than its serverless-first label.

    Engineering leadership · Book notes

  64. A family e-ink photo frame in a day (Pigment)

    I built Pigment, a self-hosted photo curation app for a color e-ink frame, and scored 7 Byonk dither settings by Oklab ΔE to land on sierra-lite.

    Home automation · Build log · E-ink frames 1

  67. One antenna, live TV in Plex on every TV in the house

    One antenna and a USB tuner pull 62 NYC channels into Plex through Tvheadend and Threadfin's virtual HDHomeRun, so the family gets live TV on every Apple TV in the house.

    Homelab & networking · Build log · OTA TV 1

  72. MCP is the API design we owed humans first

    The rush to wrap cloud and platform APIs in MCP servers is mostly intent-based API design Kubernetes showed us years ago, and a platform that needs an agent wrapper was already too chatty for people.

    AI & agents · Take

  75. Metrics and logs from the network gear

    I onboarded the router, three APs and the HP switch into VictoriaMetrics and Loki in one afternoon, and the switch reboot alert fired the next day.

    Homelab & networking · Build log · Home networking 6

  81. I turned off band steering and the Wi-Fi got better

    I spent two months tuning DAWN across three rounds on my OpenWrt APs, and the fix for my iPhone's roaming trouble was turning it off and letting 802.11r/k/v handle it.

    Homelab & networking · Build log · Home networking 5

  87. Audit the box before you wipe it

    I audited the old server top to bottom before the wipe, found four things that existed nowhere else (including a 106 GB archive hiding behind a familiar name), and traced zombies reported across 30 containers back to one.

    Homelab & networking · Build log · Budget homelab 2

  88. AdGuard Home and the query-log shipper

    AdGuard Home on the router kept only a few hours of DNS history in RAM, so I wrote a small shipper that polls the API from my home server and keeps 90 days in Loki.

    Homelab & networking · Build log · Home networking 4

  89. A used HP EliteDesk with a few mods runs my house

    An under-$300 used EliteDesk replaced my old home server through a parallel migration, and what bit me lived outside git: persisted config, a sound card index and a split remote.

    Homelab & networking · Build log · Budget homelab 1

  91. How a deploy works with Dockhand

    On my home server a deploy is a git push: Dockhand picks up the changed stack from Forgejo, redeploys it, and secrets come from 1Password, never the repo.

    Homelab & networking · Build log · Dockhand 1

  102. Walking around for fast roaming's sake

    It took four walks through the house with logs open, two wrong turns, and one evening of config changes before my iPhone started fast roaming between our OpenWrt access points.

    Homelab & networking · Build log · Home networking 2

  103. OpenWrt to the rescue

    Why a three-node Eero Pro 6E mesh lasted a few days in our house, and how OpenWrt 25.12.2 on a Flint 2 and two Cudy M3000s became the stable setup.

    Homelab & networking · Build log · Home networking 1

  108. Radical Candor and the nice boss who never says it

    Kim Scott's Radical Candor lays out four quadrants for how a boss handles the hard conversation, and the one that does the damage is the nice boss who keeps giving another chance.

    Engineering leadership · Book notes

  111. Sandi Metz's 99 Bottles of OOP and knowing when to stop

    Sandi Metz's 99 Bottles of OOP spends a whole book refactoring one beer-song program, starting from a plain version called Shameless Green that already works for a problem this size.

    Architecture & design · Book notes

  115. Worse is Better and deciding which simplicity to pay for

    Richard Gabriel's Worse is Better gets quoted as permission to ship rough work, but it's really a choice between two kinds of simplicity, and you have to pick which one your product pays for.

    Architecture & design · Book notes

  121. Cloud Strategy prices lock-in instead of fearing it

    Gregor Hohpe treats cloud lock-in as a decision with a price on both sides, and a migration becomes a set of choices about which lock-in to accept on purpose.

    Architecture & design · Book notes

  124. The Phoenix Project and the work nobody planned

    The Phoenix Project is a terrible novel with one idea that survives every complaint about it: unplanned work is work, and nobody puts it on the board.

    Reliability & operations · Book notes

  131. Always be curious

    Curiosity built everything from a Tandy 1000SX to the basement home lab, and keeping it alive takes conscious daily effort.

    Engineering leadership · Take

  132. How this site is built

    What runs michael.zazon.us: Astro on Cloudflare Pages and posts I publish from Obsidian.

    Knowledge & tools · Build log

  133. Why I built this site

    I'm always learning, always reading and always writing, and I wanted one place to put it.

    Knowledge & tools · Take