Tools

Almost nobody learns rm -rf the easy way. You read the man page, you use it carefully for a year, and then one day you watch your finger hit Enter a fraction of a second before your brain finishes checking the path. The commands that destroy data don’t punish typos. They punish the half second before the typo, when you were certain the path was right. That half second of doubt isn’t something documentation can give you. So I built a place where you can get it wrong on purpose, with nothing at stake but a score. ...

Most homelab beginners make the same mistake: they grab a Docker Compose template, paste it in, and then discover three months later that their “simple setup” is a sprawling mess of undocumented dependencies, a database with no backup, and ports wide open to the internet. I’ve been there. I still end up there sometimes. So I built a tool to catch it before it happens. ...

I write a lot of bash scripts. Most of them work. Some of them don’t — and when they don’t, I spend 20 minutes staring at an error message that, in retrospect, was actually pretty obvious. I figured: what if I could just ask an AI, from my terminal, what went wrong? That’s bashbuddy. 300 lines of pure bash. No npm. No Python. No dependencies beyond curl and jq. MIT licensed, free forever. ...

Every sysadmin has the same job, really. It’s not “manage servers.” It’s not “configure networks.” It’s: explain technical things to non-technical people. My dad calls me. Something’s wrong with his computer. He says: “It says something about DNS and the connection isn’t private.” What do I actually need to tell him? I could say: “Your router’s DNS resolution is failing because the ISP’s nameserver at 8.8.8.8 isn’t responding, causing an SSL handshake failure due to certificate verification timing out.” That’s accurate. It’s also useless. What I actually say: “Your internet is having a momentary hiccup. Turn the router off and on, wait 30 seconds, try again.” Same fix. Better explanation. That’s the gap I tried to fill with Plain English. ...

What IT Pros Actually Do On Their Own Machines (vs What They Tell You) There’s the advice IT hands out. The official line. The stuff in the company handbook. Then there’s what actually happens on the machines of the people who wrote that handbook. I’m not here to throw anyone under the bus. But after years in this industry, there are some pretty consistent gaps between what gets preached and what gets practised. And honestly? Closing that gap will make your computing life significantly better. ...