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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ClickHouse vs DuckDB vs StarRocks: Light OLAP
ClickHouse, DuckDB, or StarRocks for home lab analytics? A practical guide to picking the right OLAP engine for your query patterns without losing the weekend.
11 min read -
Speculative Decoding: Faster LLMs With a Tiny Sidekick
Speculative decoding, Gemma 4 MTP, and DeepSeek DSpark all make LLMs 2-6x faster losslessly. How each works, and which to use for local vs. serving.
13 min read -
Gitea Actions vs Woodpecker CI
Gitea Actions vs Woodpecker CI: two solid self-hosted CI options, one clear winner for your setup. Compare syntax, runners, footprint, and secrets handling.
13 min read -
Adding NOT NULL on a Big Table Without Downtime
How to safely add a NOT NULL column with a live backfill on a 200M-row Postgres table without locking your users out or scheduling any maintenance downtime.
11 min read -
Karakeep: Self-Hosted Bookmarks With AI Tagging
Karakeep (formerly Hoarder) is a self-hosted Pocket alternative with AI auto-tagging, full-text search, and Docker Compose deploy in under 10 minutes.
10 min read -
Firefly III vs Actual vs Fava (Beancount)
Firefly III is full-featured. Actual Budget is YNAB-style. Fava+Beancount is plain-text accounting. Here's how to pick self-hosted personal finance.
10 min read -
Postgres HA: Patroni + etcd + HAProxy
Build a real Postgres 17 HA cluster with Patroni 4.x, etcd 3.5, and HAProxy — fully automatic failover, tested switchover procedure, zero manual babysitting.
12 min read -
Syncthing for Dotfiles: Sync vs Manage
Syncthing mirrors your files in real time, but is that actually a good idea for dotfiles? An honest comparison against chezmoi and proper dotfile managers.
11 min read -
Btrfs RAID 5/6: Still Don't
The kernel docs still warn about it. The Btrfs wiki still warns about it. People still build it and lose data. Here's the write hole, why RAID 1/10 are fine, and what to use instead.
6 min read -
Dragonfly vs Redis: Single-Binary Performance
DragonflyDB vs Redis 7.4 and Valkey 8.x: architecture deep dive, real performance benchmarks, honest gotchas, and when to swap your cache layer for a dragon.
10 min read -
ntfy vs Gotify vs Apprise: Push Stacks
ntfy is curl-friendly push with iOS. Gotify is self-hosted with web UI. Apprise abstracts 70+ providers. Here's how to wire homelab notifications.
10 min read -
Syncthing Through Untrusted VPS Relays
Sync files between machines that are never online together using Syncthing's untrusted encrypted devices, dual-VPS failover, and a Tailscale-only network path.
13 min read
