SumGuy's Ramblings
The art of wasting time.
Docker, self-hosting, AI/LLM, Linux, and DevOps — explained by someone who learned the hard way. No fluff, no enterprise jargon, just practical stuff that actually works on real hardware.
Recent Posts
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HAProxy vs Envoy
HAProxy vs Envoy for L4/L7 load balancing — config style, performance, observability, service mesh fit, and which one belongs in your home lab.
9 min read -
Home Assistant Voice: Wyoming vs Rhasspy
Wyoming protocol vs Rhasspy for local Home Assistant voice — which offline stack actually works in 2026, hardware requirements, and when to choose each one.
11 min read -
MCP Servers: Tools for LLMs
Model Context Protocol turns your LLM into a tool-using agent — file access, APIs, your home lab. Build your first MCP server in under 50 lines of Python.
12 min read -
Caddy vs Traefik
Caddyfile zen vs Traefik labels-everywhere — picking a reverse proxy for self-hosted services in 2026. Real configs, real gotchas.
10 min read -
Promtail to Alloy Migration: A Practical Diff
Promtail is deprecated. Here's how to migrate your scrape configs, pipeline stages, and Docker log setups to Grafana Alloy without losing your mind or data.
9 min read -
RAG Evaluation with Ragas
Most RAG demos look great until you ship them. Ragas measures faithfulness, context precision, answer relevancy — the metrics that actually predict user trust.
13 min read -
Bun vs Deno vs Node in 2026
Picking a JavaScript runtime in 2026 — Bun, Deno, and Node compared on speed, ecosystem, TS support, and self-hosted use cases.
11 min read -
LibreNMS for SNMP-Heavy Home Networks
LibreNMS auto-discovers your switches, APs, and UPS over SNMP with zero MIB hunting. Here's how to deploy it and stop abusing Prometheus for this job.
9 min read -
LLM Distillation Explained
How tiny 7B and 8B models keep punching above their weight — knowledge distillation, the teacher-student trick that makes local AI actually usable on home hardware.
13 min read -
Rancher vs Podman vs Docker Desktop
Rancher Desktop, Podman Desktop, and Docker Desktop go head-to-head on cost, k8s, resource use, and real-world friction for local dev.
11 min read -
SmokePing for Internet Connection Sanity
SmokePing turns your ISP no-issue-detected excuse into a documented lie. Set it up in Docker and get clear visual proof of latency spikes and packet loss.
10 min read -
Garden vs Tilt vs Skaffold
Three inner-loop dev tools for Kubernetes — Garden, Tilt, and Skaffold. Which one actually makes K8s development bearable? Honest comparison, no fluff.
9 min read
