Systems Engineer · Builder · Homelabber
I build systems.
Infrastructure. Automation. Software. AI.
I'm Ben — a Senior Systems Engineer by trade, and a compulsive builder outside of it. This site is where the infrastructure, automation, software, and AI-agent projects live, alongside the writing and the notebook of things I'm still testing.
Current Operations
TESTING
Nous Research Hermes, self-hosted
Beszel alerts → agent diagnosis → Telegram approval → root-cause fix
RUNNING
Homelab, self-hosted stack
Media, monitoring, and Loom in production
BUILDING
Per-service agent rules
What's safe to touch autonomously, and when
LEARNING
Coolify deployment patterns
Multi-service Docker Compose in production
Selected Systems
Automation
activeESP32 Smart Desk
Replacing a cheap standing desk's handset with an ESP32 so Home Assistant knows how high it is, can move it to an exact height, and stands me up when I've been sitting too long. No soldering, no new parts.
ESP32 · ESPHome · C++ · Home Assistant · mmWave presence
Updated 2026-10-27
AI / Agents
experimentalHomelab playground: Nous Research Hermes
Nous Research Hermes running in the homelab with terminal-level Proxmox access. It now picks up flaking Docker containers from Beszel monitoring, troubleshoots them, asks for approval over Telegram, and then fixes the root cause instead of just restarting the container.
Nous Research Hermes · Proxmox · Beszel · Telegram · Uptime Kuma · n8n · Docker
Updated 2026-10-23
Software
activeGoogle Review Intelligence
Single-admin internal tool that manually triggers Google review scrapes, imports them idempotently, and turns the result into rating trends, phrase analysis, and formula-safe CSV exports.
Next.js · TypeScript · PostgreSQL · Prisma · pg-boss · DataForSEO · Apify · Docker
Updated 2026-09-23
Software
maintainedLead Qualification System
Split-service pipeline that imports local business leads, scores each one on website opportunity, and syncs only the ones a human approves to HubSpot.
Next.js · TypeScript · PostgreSQL · Prisma · Redis · BullMQ · Docker
Updated 2026-05-16
Areas of Work
Latest Writing
The Uptime Monitor That Was Down for 27 Days
A disk-full cleanup most likely deleted my self-hosted monitor's database, and nothing noticed for almost a month. The fixes: treat 'unused' storage as precious, verify stored external IDs before trusting them, and make sure something watches the watcher.
Auto-Tagging a Photo Library When a Wrong Tag Costs More Than a Missing One
Zero-shot image models make tagging thousands of photos cheap, but the hard part is deciding when a tag is safe to apply unreviewed. Per-tag thresholds, negative descriptions, a spot-check gate, and small classifiers trained on those checks got me there.
Building Agent-Ready Surfaces for Information
How to structure a page, doc set, or API so AI agents can actually find, parse, and correctly cite what you publish — and why that's a different job than SEO.
Stack Snapshot
Identity & Access
- Entra ID
- Conditional Access
- Okta
- SSO/SAML
Endpoint & Security
- Intune
- Microsoft Defender
- Autopilot
- CrowdStrike
Cloud & Infrastructure
- Azure
- Microsoft 365
- Proxmox
- Terraform
Networking
- VLANs
- pfSense/OPNsense
- VPN
- DNS
Automation
- PowerShell
- Microsoft Graph API
- Azure Automation
- Zapier
Software
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
AI / Agents
- Claude
- MCP
- Ollama
- LangChain
Homelab
- Docker
- Kubernetes (k3s)
- Ceph
- Prometheus / Grafana