Jason Burns

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

Insulating the Chicken Coop – The Data

Earlier this year, I took the time to insulate the walls of the chicken coop and cover the insulation with 1/4" plywood. I had hoped we could go without needing a heater in there in the deep winter, and luckily…

February 19, 2026Carpentry, Home Automation, Homestead

The Painless Problem: Why Kibana Runtime Fields Needed an AI Skill, Not Better Docs

When I owned the Runtime Fields authoring experience in Kibana, we shipped a feature that was elegant in concept and brutal in practice. The concept: define fields at query time against an existing data view, no reindex required, perfect for…

February 3, 2026Development, Product Management

Goodbye Ring, Hello Privacy

With it being ever more likely that someone could access Ring cameras or lock me out of access to Ring footage, I decided it was time to leave Ring for the doorbell cameras. I had two, one on the house,…

January 13, 2026AI Projects, Security

Beyond the IP Address: Modernizing Homelab Infrastructure for Security and Scalability

In a growing homelab environment, managing services through raw IP addresses and port numbers quickly becomes a bottleneck for both security and usability, not to mention incredibly annoying unsafe browser warnings. My goal for this project was to move away…

January 11, 2026Home Automation, Security

From Smart Bulbs to Skynet: The 2026 State of my Home Automation

When I left Elastic, one of my goals was to dive deep into home automation and finally "level up" my setup. Looking back at where I started when we first moved to Graham, it’s almost comical. Back then, "Home Automation"…

January 1, 2026AI Projects, Computers, Home Automation, Security