This site is built with about 180 lines of Go. It reads markdown from posts/, runs each file through blackfriday, and stitches everything into the templates I keep in tpl/. No themes, no plugins, no config file beyond a single TOML for site title and base URL.
The interesting part isn't the generator — there are dozens of those — it's the discipline. Every time I try to add a feature (tags, RSS categorisation, draft mode, footnotes), I ask whether I'd actually use it more than once. The answer is almost always no. So I delete the patch and ship without it.
If I ever publish the source, it'll be on a Sunday afternoon with the README written before the code.
I was a Neovim person for years, with a init.lua the size of a small library. In January I tried Helix on a whim and never went back. The selection-first model just clicks for the kind of work I do — lots of refactors, lots of small mechanical edits.
The honest assessment, three months in: I'm slightly slower at single-file editing, and noticeably faster at anything multi-cursor or LSP-heavy. The defaults handle 90% of what my plugin soup used to do. The remaining 10% I just don't miss.
Will I come back to Neovim? Probably, eventually. Tools are seasonal.
I have a small cluster on the shelf above my desk: four Pi 5s with NVMe hats, a switch, and a single Anker brick. Total power draw is about 23 W idle. It runs my photo backup (Immich), an internal Git mirror, and Home Assistant.
The thing nobody tells you about a homelab is the maintenance creep. Once you have services people you live with depend on, every kernel update is a Saturday morning. I now keep a paper notebook by the cluster with the date of every reboot and what broke. It's the most useful piece of documentation I own.
Next experiment: a single-node K3s on one of the Pis, mostly to relearn manifests I've been avoiding for two years.
I wrote a 400-line CLI that tails systemd journals across a few servers and groups lines by tag. It does one thing: when something breaks at 11 p.m., I want to see what each box was saying for the last fifteen minutes, side by side, without opening four ssh windows.
Three weeks of use, and I think I've saved maybe two hours total. Was it worth a weekend to write? Yes — but only because the writing itself was the point.