$ cat uses.txt
Uses
The exact bench behind BeardByte Labs — the tools, gear, and self-hosted stack that earn their slot. No affiliate padding. If it stopped pulling weight, it got swapped.
last updated 2026-06-18 · diffed against the running config
$ tree ~/stack --depth 1
The stack, exploded
Four layers, wired together. Copper is the human layer; teal is what the machines run.
Software stack by category
01dev/
Development
Where the recipes get written. Keyboard-first, mono everywhere.
- Neovim + LazyVim
daily driver — LSP, treesitter, no mouse
- VS Code
fallback for big refactors + Live Share pairing
- Ghostty + tmux
GPU terminal; tmux keeps sessions warm
- TypeScript
default for web + tooling; strict mode, no any
- Python 3.12 + uv
automation, glue scripts, LLM-for-ops runbooks
- Go
single-binary CLIs and latency-sensitive services
02infra/
Infrastructure
The cloud edge — reproducible, versioned, and boring on purpose.
- Terraform
infra as code; state in a remote backend, PR-reviewed
- GitHub Actions
CI/CD — lint, test, build, deploy on merge
- Ansible
post-provision config; idempotent playbooks
- Cloudflare
DNS, CDN, and Tunnels — no ports exposed
- Vercel
this site + a preview deploy per branch
- Tailscale
flat mesh VPN; ACLs are the guardrail
03homelab/
Homelab
The rack that never sleeps. Everything self-hosted, everything monitored.
- Proxmox VE
hypervisor — VMs for stateful, LXC for the rest
- Docker + Compose
one repo of stacks; git is the source of truth
- TrueNAS (ZFS)
snapshots + scrubs; the backup you actually test
- Caddy
reverse proxy — automatic TLS, a tidy Caddyfile
- Home Assistant + MQTT
automations; sensors talk over MQTT
- Grafana + Prometheus
dashboards + alerts; a postmortem per pager
04desk/
Productivity
The human layer — notes, focus, and secrets that stay secret.
- Obsidian
lab notebook; every project starts as a markdown page
- Raycast
launcher, clipboard history, snippet expansion
- Linear
one board; issues link straight to the repo
- Bitwarden
self-hosted vault; TOTP + passkeys
- Firefox
containers per identity, uBlock as the default
- Flameshot
screenshots + annotations for the writeups
$ rack/sentinel --watch
The rack, instrumented.
Airflow → MQTT → Prometheus → an alert budget that stays quiet until it matters.
$ lshw -short
Hardware on the bench
The metal underneath. Nothing exotic — just gear picked to be quiet, cheap to run, and easy to reflash at 1am.
Physical hardware
The rack
mini-PC cluster + NAS
- Beelink mini-PCs (N100 / Ryzen) as Proxmox nodes
- 4-bay NAS, ZFS mirror, nightly snapshots off-site
- UPS on the whole shelf — clean shutdowns, no corruption
The bench
ESP32 + sensors
- ESP32 / ESP8266 flashed with ESPHome
- Breadboard rats-nest: DHT22, PIR, current clamps
- USB logic analyzer + hot-air station for the weird bugs
The wire
network + workstation
- UniFi gateway + switch; VLANs isolate IoT from everything
- 2.5GbE to the desk, 10GbE trunk to the NAS
- Ryzen 9 workstation, 64GB RAM, dual NVMe
No sponsors, no affiliate links, no “best of” padding. This is what actually runs. When a tool breaks or a better pattern shows up, the swap gets a lab note.