Tightening a dev VM that was quietly living without a firewall
What a routine security audit found on a small always-on dev VM: passwordless databases, no host firewall, over-privileged jobs, and how it got fixed.
Tag: automation
Golden Rules for Cheaper, Safer LLM Agents
Notes on turning repeated AI workflows into scripts, skills, cron jobs, and guardrails so agents become cheaper, safer, and more useful over time.
Don't Leave Good AI Workflows in Chat
A practical note on promoting repeated AI workflows into slash commands, scripts, and cron jobs, weighing judgment, cost, and safety trade-offs.
Running Hermes on a Cloud Machine as a Daily Routine Assistant
How I wired Hermes Agent on a remote Linux box into Telegram, email, calendar, error monitoring, GitHub, and a daily morning briefing routine.
Intelligent Applications and the Personal OS
The closing piece of a 12-part series on how software is shifting from apps you click through to intelligent systems and a personal OS that act for you.
AI Employees: Building Your Digital Workforce
What changes when AI moves from a tool you operate to an autonomous agent you manage like an employee, and how to do that responsibly.
I Let an AI Agent Write Code for a Week. Here's What Actually Worked.
A week of testing OpenHands, the autonomous AI coding agent, on real projects: what worked, what failed, and the setup that made it reliable.
The One-Person Company: AI as Force Multiplier
How AI lets a single founder cover work that used to require a small team, and the real trade-offs of choosing to run a company alone.
Monitor Cloudflare WARP Status on macOS with launchd
A launchd-scheduled shell script that detects when Cloudflare WARP reconnects on a company-managed Mac and sends a desktop notification.
jq and yq: transforming embedded key-value strings in YAML
jq and yq combine to turn a YAML file's embedded key=value strings into properly structured, typed fields, using a single scan and from_entries pipeline.
Rufus-Scheduler vs Sidekiq-Scheduler for Ruby Jobs
Comparing rufus-scheduler's in-process polling loop with sidekiq-scheduler's Redis-backed queue to pick the right one for single-process vs distributed apps.
Rufus Scheduler: How Its Main Loop Actually Works
How rufus-scheduler's single-threaded main loop triggers, times out, and runs jobs, and where a timer-based rewrite would scale better.
Whisper: An Open-Source Alternative to Cloud Speech-to-Text
OpenAI's Whisper is a self-hostable alternative to Google's Speech-to-Text API, with a Flask wrapper and a C++ port covered here alongside the original model.
Sending Pub/Sub Notifications to Slack With a Webhook
A small Node.js Cloud Function that decodes a Pub/Sub message, filters it by type, and forwards it to Slack through an incoming webhook.
Zero-Downtime PostgreSQL Upgrades With Logical Replication
A bash script that sets up PostgreSQL logical replication, publications, and subscriptions to perform a major-version upgrade without downtime.
count file size from json
A bash one-liner that uses jq to pull resource IDs out of lesson JSON files, then du to total their file sizes on disk.