About

Something breaks. The search comes back with a forum thread from 2013 and no replies, a Stack Overflow question closed as off-topic, and a page of results that are all the same wrong answer. The only way out is to work it out yourself. That is where nearly every post on this site came from.

I’m Tobey. I work in DevOps and Java at a bank, which is the long way of saying I turned the hobby into the job and then kept the hobby anyway.

So: Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, CI pipelines and certificates from the work side; Home Assistant, ESP32s, routers, nutrition trackers and whatever gadget is currently misbehaving from the home side. Some of it is a five-minute fix somebody else can paste straight into a terminal. Some of it took a weekend.

I try to be honest about the parts that didn’t work, and about tools that are more hype than help. Every post also carries its own age, in words, because a fix from 2016 and a fix from last month are not the same promise and it would be dishonest to print them at the same size.

Where this is going is less certain than it used to be. These days an AI agent will often work a problem out before I would have got round to writing it up, and I am not going to pretend that leaves this kind of post untouched — a good share of what is in the archive is exactly the thing an agent is now quite good at producing on demand. So the writing has not stopped, but more of my time now goes into the projects I build rather than into the write-up of a fix that something else can hand you in ten seconds.

The archive stays up either way, and the feed is where it has always been.

Something I got wrong, or a question the posts don’t answer? Contact me.