hi, i'm jacques
Principal engineer. I build software that's boring in production — and a home lab that very much isn't.
Field notes from the enterprise trenches and the home lab. Half deep dives, half "I can't believe that worked." New posts when the lab coughs up something worth sharing.
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The Tronxy that didn't want to live: a Klipper conversion
I spent three evenings fighting the undocumented v10 board to prove I could — the board that just worked in one try had been in storage the whole time.
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k3s: Kubernetes That Fits in a Homelab
k3s gives a homelab the same orchestration primitives as production Kubernetes, at a fraction of the hardware cost — the honest head-to-head.
Consistent AI-generated covers for a static blog
Brand consistency with AI images isn't a prompting problem — it's a pipeline problem. Here's the one I built in a weekend.
Using AI to hunt homelab deals in South Africa
Finding a good deal on secondhand hardware takes digging. Pointing an AI agent at it got me three k3s nodes for less than one new one would've cost.
I Just Wanted Two Terminals to Talk to Each Other
The thing that started the-bureau wasn't a vision for agent orchestration. It was a Linux box I didn't want to babysit.
Skills vs MCP: when 50 tool calls is the smell
45 MCP tools and the parameter fatigue to match — forever tweaking arguments to do something simple. The fix was a skill that read my grudging docs.
Ship the agent's code review, then ship an agent to doubt it
A single agent pass is plausible-but-unverified. The fix isn't more prompting — it's a separate agent whose only job is to refute the first one.