Hi. I'm Paul, and this is where I keep the things I've figured out.
Or so I'd like to believe.
I am a business/software engineer by training (whatever that may mean) and a generalist by temperament. I've shipped backends that get paged at night, infinite loops, deployed on Friday at 5pm, and learned the next Monday why that was a mistake. I write about the where software meets the physical world, which today mostly means AI, but also homelab stuff, Docker containers that don't work,and my ongoing battle with Home Assistant.
This site exists for no good reason really. I wanted a place to write down what I've been working on. Maybe it helps someone. Maybe it makes someone laugh. Maybe it causes you to facepalm so hard your head hurts. Any of them means this worked out. And let's be honest. How many times have you Googled an issue you had, only to find the same Stackoverflow question you asked 3 years ago without a single reply. So now I write it down. Most of the time..
Writing about something forces me to understand it. Posting it forces me to be less wrong. That's probably the point.
The pieces here are long when they need to be, short when they don't. I try not to be a tutorial; there are better tutorials. I try not to be a corporate thought-leadership column; there are too many of those already. What I aim for is the tone of a notebook someone left in a house: full of random scribbles, the occasional doodle, but also honest, specific and probably very frustrated at the thing that broke again..
If you want to know what I'm actually working on right now, the homepage's now card is kept current by hand. It's not much, but it's honest work. And obviously this site. And work. There's also work.
Plausibly asked questions.
Is the site name a joke?
Partly. "Works on my machine" is the oldest apology in software. It's also the most honest description of anything I'd write here: it worked for me, in my conditions, on my hardware, on a Tuesday at 4:20pm. Your mileage will vary. That's the whole point of writing it down.
Why no newsletter or comments
Comments are a moderation job I don't want and newsletters are a product I don't want to run. RSS is older than I am and still works.
Do you take sponsorships or affiliate links?
No. If I recommend something, I paid for it. If that ever changes, this line will change with it.
Can I republish your posts?
Mostly yes — everything is MIT, credit with a link back. Don't feed them to a model without asking; that's a different conversation and I'd like to have it.
If something here was useful, or wrong, tell me.
Corrections are the best kind of email. I reply to most things eventually, usually in batches with too much coffee. Assume nothing is urgent. And hey, a compliment is nice as well. We need more of those!