Case studies
A handful of technical decisions, told in the same shape: context, constraint, decision, measurement.
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Database consolidation — six instances down to one
Cut memory pressure on a saturated Pi4 by merging six scattered MariaDB instances under a single engine, with no visible interruption for downstream services.
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In-house identity — moving to Authentik (WebAuthn / YubiKey / TOTP)
Multi-user SSO with a polished sign-in screen and strong factors. Migrated from Authelia with care given to perceived experience.
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Alerting hygiene — ntfy refactored into four channels
Split notifications by semantic register and persist deduplication. End of late-night alert storms.
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Infrastructure atlas — auto-generated documentation
A cron scanner that produces Markdown, HTML and Mermaid diagrams from the Pi cluster. Documentation stops being a permanent backlog.
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Frictionless capture — Apple Notes into a central database
A simple pipeline that ingests phone notes into a unified database. Capture stays native; analysis becomes possible.