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clean-term: A Minimal Oh My Zsh Theme That Actually Works Everywhere featured image

clean-term: A Minimal Oh My Zsh Theme That Actually Works Everywhere

Every terminal theme I tried either broke across fonts or added visual noise I did not need. So I built a 14-line ASCII-safe Oh My Zsh theme that works anywhere.

Derek Armstrong - Staff Software Engineer and Solutions Architect
Derek Armstrong
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How I Bridged CLI AI Agents to Apple's Walled Garden featured image

How I Bridged CLI AI Agents to Apple's Walled Garden

Apple apps are locked down with no APIs, but SQLite local databases and AppleScript let CLI AI agents bridge Reminders, Notes, Calendar, Mail and more — no cloud, no API keys, just …

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Self-Hosting Plausible Analytics with Podman and Cloudflare Tunnels featured image

Self-Hosting Plausible Analytics with Podman and Cloudflare Tunnels

How I deployed self-hosted Plausible analytics on a podman server, routed it through Cloudflare tunnels, and integrated it with my Hugo site — with a backup strategy that actually …

Derek Armstrong - Staff Software Engineer and Solutions Architect
Derek Armstrong
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Self Hosted AI: Actually Running Local LLMs for a Multi-User Household featured image

Self Hosted AI: Actually Running Local LLMs for a Multi-User Household

How self-hosted AI became the final piece of my homelab puzzle, delivering true parallel processing for multi-user setups and unlocking the real superpower of knowledge management.

Derek Armstrong - Staff Software Engineer and Solutions Architect
Derek Armstrong
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Running Qwen3.6 27B Locally on Dual RTX 3090s with vLLM v0.19 featured image

Running Qwen3.6 27B Locally on Dual RTX 3090s with vLLM v0.19

How I went from a blank Docker template to 116+ tok/s with speculative decoding, FlashInfer, and a 160k context window on dual 3090s.

Derek Armstrong - Staff Software Engineer and Solutions Architect
Derek Armstrong
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The Proxmox Utility Toolkit: Stop Cloning That VM by Hand featured image

The Proxmox Utility Toolkit: Stop Cloning That VM by Hand

A tour of my open-source Proxmox utility toolkit — scripts, docs, and learning paths for homelabbers and enterprise engineers who are tired of repeating themselves.

Derek Armstrong - Staff Software Engineer and Solutions Architect
Derek Armstrong
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Build Your Personalized AI System Prompt featured image

Build Your Personalized AI System Prompt

The secret to a great AI assistant isn't the model — it's what you tell it about yourself. Here's the framework for building a system prompt that makes AI actually useful.

Derek Armstrong - Staff Software Engineer and Solutions Architect
Derek Armstrong
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Qwen3.5 Showdown: 27B Q8 vs 35B-A3B Q8 — Real-World Testing for Local AI featured image

Qwen3.5 Showdown: 27B Q8 vs 35B-A3B Q8 — Real-World Testing for Local AI

A real-world comparison of Qwen3.5 27B Q8 and 35B-A3B Q8 running locally on a dual RTX 3090 homelab — which one actually belongs in your daily workflow?

Derek Armstrong - Staff Software Engineer and Solutions Architect
Derek Armstrong
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One Year Later: The Agentic CLI Revolution Revisited featured image

One Year Later: The Agentic CLI Revolution Revisited

A year ago, I predicted CLI AI tools would transform development. Here's what actually happened—the good, the unexpected, and the 'wait, what?' moments.

Derek Armstrong - Staff Software Engineer and Solutions Architect
Derek Armstrong
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Homelab Database Decisions: Boring Is Brilliant featured image

Homelab Database Decisions: Boring Is Brilliant

A practical field guide for picking stable, boring databases that keep your homelab calm at 2 a.m.

Derek Armstrong - Staff Software Engineer and Solutions Architect
Derek Armstrong
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