Jason

Backyard Birds: Building My Own Dashboard on Top of Local Bird Data

A few weeks back I wrote about replacing my Haikubox with a four-camera local pipeline feeding BirdNET into TimescaleDB. The data was beautiful. The dashboards were not. Grafana is great for whether the heat pump cycled overnight or how warm…

May 24, 2026Birding, Development

Ceres Update: Building the Schema, Then Tearing Half of It Out

A week ago I introduced Ceres, the multi-agent garden assistant Kim and I are building for our raised beds. A week later there is, in fact, code — and a careful re-design that ripped out part of it within three days.

May 19, 2026AI Projects, Home Automation, Homestead

Managing a Homelab AI Project with Claude Code, Gitea, and the Gitea MCP Server

I am not a software engineer. I think in milestones, user stories, and outcomes. Kim wants a smart garden assistant that tells her when to water and when the blight risk is high. I want to build it. Solo homelab…

May 13, 2026AI Projects, Development, Home Automation, Homestead, Product Management

Building Ceres, a Multi-Agent Garden Assistant

We are growing a lot of vegetables this year. Carrots, cauliflower, russet potatoes, Roma tomatoes, and more are all going into fourteen raised beds in our garden. We have done our research, but there are a lot of variables in…

May 12, 2026AI Projects, Home Automation, Homestead

I Stopped Doom Scrolling By Building My Own News Feed

A few weeks ago I stopped using Reddit. Not because the content was bad. There's genuinely useful stuff there, but because I had no control over it. I was just overwhelmed with irrelevant content, negative content and constant suggestion of…

May 7, 2026AI Projects, Development, Productivity

Why I Swapped InfluxDB for TimescaleDB – The LLM Tax

For years, InfluxDB has been the data backbone of my Home Assistant setup. With the native Home Assistant integration and Grafana, I had my dashboards dialed in. While FluxQL was a bit of a learning curve, I was able to…

April 24, 2026AI Projects, Home Automation

Listening to the Birds with AI – My Local HaikuBox

A few year ago, I saw a very cool product. Haikubox, is a small device that listens to birds at home, identifies them and gives you a nice web interface to see what's going on. Over time, I realized one…

April 23, 2026AI Projects, Python

AI-Powered Security Camera Reviews with Frigate, n8n, and Ollama

Frigate is great at detecting objects. It will tell you a person showed up at the front porch, or that a car pulled into the driveway. What it won't tell you is whether that person is your neighbor waving hello…

April 17, 2026AI Projects, Home Automation, Security

How I Would Build the Tableau Connector SDK Today

I spent six years at Tableau turning data connectivity from a centralized engineering bottleneck into a partner ecosystem. We went from about 40 connectors, all built by Tableau engineers, to 120+ in the catalog with partners building their own. The…

April 16, 2026Development, Product Management

From Coral to Hailo: Why I Finally Swapped My Frigate AI Hardware

I have been running Frigate for quite a while now. The Google Coral TPU has long been the "gold standard" for edge processing object detection. It’s efficient, cheap, and handles MobileNet models like a champ. But as my camera count…

February 26, 2026AI Projects, Home Automation, Security