Tyblog

My favorite metonymic technology term is "cron job": even though cron may not literally be the daemon that executes actions on a schedule, we apply the term to anything that walks like a cron and quacks like a cron. As Patrick McKenzie likes to point out, cron jobs are one of the most eminently useful computing primitives. They offer utility that's almost immediately obvious for plenty of use cases that almost everybody has: do this every day; do that once a month.

This moment—early 2026—is a particularly well-suited time in history to start self-hosting applications and rely on your own infrastructure. Whether in a local homelab or your own cloud deployment, the tools to build out personal environments have been getting better over time. The future looks a little shaky, though, so now is your moment! Increasing hardware costs have started to bloat the price of getting started and we're staring the down barrel of drastically variable software quality as large language model (LLM) adoption grows (for better or worse).

My point is: if you've flirted with the idea in the past, we may be at peak conditions for taking the plunge, and I'll explain why.

…because without dramatic policies that addressed the disruption that artificial intelligence products introduced, we'd be in a bad spot.

This is the blog post I wished I could have read when making electric vehicle (EV) purchasing decisions in 2024.

I store all of my critical data in ZFS and replicate it offsite nightly with zrepl. The monitoring page of the zrepl docs mock me with:

Monitoring endpoints are configured in the global.monitoring section of the config file. […] zrepl can expose Prometheus metrics via HTTP.