// The API Key Problem Nobody Saw Coming For over a decade, Google told developers that API keys weren’t secrets. Embed them in your JavaScript. Paste them into your HTML. Ship them in your client-side code. Firebase’s own security checklist had a green checkmark next to “API keys for Firebase services are not secret.” Google…
I’ve sat in that chair. Not Dario Amodei’s specifically — mine had worse lumbar support and the coffee was from a Keurig — but the same chair. The one where you’re the security person trying to explain to a room full of excited stakeholders why we need to slow down. Why the thing they want…
Will Larson’s An Elegant Puzzle has a chapter on presenting to leadership that changed how I think about structured communication. A 7-step framework for making recommendations that actually land. Clear, repeatable, effective. Problem is, frameworks you don’t use are just bookmarks. So I did what any self-respecting terminal dweller would do: I turned it into…
Every blog post you publish about privacy, security, or self-hosting? Your own site is probably undermining it while your readers read it. I’m not talking about malware or breaches. I’m talking about the quiet stuff — the third-party requests that fire on every single pageview, sending your visitors’ IP addresses to companies they never consented…
My pinball leaderboard kiosk sits in a bar three hours away. I can’t drive over and reboot it. I can’t ask the bar owner to SSH in and restart a service. If that screen goes dark during league night, nobody’s fixing it until I make a six-hour round trip. So I engineered it to never…
Go to myactivity.google.com. Right now. I’ll wait. Scroll through that list. Every search you’ve made. Every question you were too embarrassed to ask a friend. Every 2 AM medical symptom panic. Every job listing you clicked while still employed. Every weird hobby you explored for a week and abandoned. That’s not a search history. That’s…
Every server in my homelab backs itself up automatically, ships copies to a dedicated backup server, and pushes a weekly snapshot to Google Drive — all while I sleep. If my house burns down tomorrow, I lose nothing. This isn’t enterprise gear. It’s Duplicati, some n8n workflows, and a backup server built from spare parts….
It’s a Tuesday morning. You’re three coffees deep, tweaking your most complex n8n workflow — the one that took two weekends, a mass of Stack Overflow tabs, and one mass of profanity to build. You’re dragging nodes around, cleaning things up, making it pretty. Then you accidentally delete a connection. No — worse. You accidentally…
Every morning at 9 AM, I get an email. It’s not from a paid newsletter service. It’s not curated by a human editor. It’s a polished, 4-section tech digest built entirely by an n8n workflow and Google’s Gemini AI — running on my own server, completely free. It pulls from 15 RSS feeds, filters out…
If you’re running a homelab, you’re probably on a constant quest for the ultimate automation tool—that one magic piece of software that can tie all your disparate services together. For me, and for many others, n8n has come incredibly close to being that tool. It’s a powerful, flexible, and visually intuitive way to build complex…