Experiments, side projects, and notes from the dev lab.
I wired a Raspberry Pi to text me whenever something in my home lab breaks, and then I gave the notifications a personality. A month of passive-aggressive alerts later, I know exactly which failures actually deserve my attention.
Ten years of commits, branches, and abandoned repos turned out to be the most honest productivity journal I never kept. Here's how I ran the analysis, what the 2am commits had in common, and the three habits that came out of it.
Half a year of daily engineering notes, dumped into one file and actually re-read. What I found: ideas that took three tries to stick, dead ends that were just early, and one debugging blind spot that cost me entire weekends. Plus the dead-simple note template that made the audit possible.
I released a tiny CLI tool as open source and committed to treating it like a digital pet — daily feedings, weekly grooming, full emotional investment. Here's the honest ledger of hours, stars, and what it actually cost me.
Perfumers can tell a good fragrance from a cheap knockoff in one whiff. Developers should be able to do the same with frameworks. Here's the five-sniff test I run before anything gets a repo in my lab.
Hosting, domains, API credits, a Raspberry Pi that never sleeps — the real operating cost of a one-person dev lab, itemized. Plus the ROI rule I use to decide which experiments earn compute time and which get a graceful shutdown.
I dragged five half-dead experiments out of my repos folder, gave each one a README, a demo, and a two-page write-up, and stapled them to a single landing page. Three weeks later, two interviewers brought up the parking app unprompted. Here's exactly what I changed and what recruiters actually clicked.
I ran my own homelab for twelve months and kept receipts on everything — power, parts, drive failures, and the hours I'll never get back. Here's the unvarnished math, what the same budget buys in the cloud, and how to tell if your server rack is a hobby or a habit.
We celebrate launches and quietly ignore the projects we abandon, which is exactly backwards. Killing a side project — deliberately, with a post-mortem — is a judgment skill worth putting on display. Here are six funerals from my own graveyard and what each one taught me.
A working list of seven experiments I'm running this year, from local LLMs on a mini PC to a $15 garage automation hack. Each entry has a hypothesis, a tool stack, and a difficulty rating — steal one and build along.
Every developer has a folder full of half-baked experiments nobody asked for. Mine includes a Slack bot that graded tacos and a CLI that guessed when my laundry would finish. Here's why I'm done apologizing for them — and why you shouldn't apologize for yours either.
Most developer portfolios are digital business cards gathering dust — built once, never measured, never improved. I rebuilt aleksdelab.com like it was a product with users, and the before/after numbers convinced me this is how every dev should think about their personal site.
I challenged myself to ship one tiny project every week for a month — no polish passes, no rewrites, no excuses. Here's the honest log: what launched, what flopped, and why shrinking the scope on day three saved every single release.