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Three and a Half Weeks, 689M Tokens, No Meter featured image

Three and a Half Weeks, 689M Tokens, No Meter

689M tokens. 25 days. ~$40 electricity. The math, the caveats, and what changed when the meter stopped existing.

Derek Armstrong - Payments Engineer · AI · Infrastructure
Derek Armstrong
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Qwen3.8 27B on Dual RTX 3090s: A vLLM Field Report featured image

Qwen3.8 27B on Dual RTX 3090s: A vLLM Field Report

Three days into making Qwen3.8 27B my daily local coding driver on dual 3090s — the hybrid linear-attention architecture, an OOM that masqueraded as a backend error, and what the …

Derek Armstrong - Payments Engineer · AI · Infrastructure
Derek Armstrong
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I Built an LLM Traffic Router for My Homelab — Here is What Happened featured image

I Built an LLM Traffic Router for My Homelab — Here is What Happened

I hooked up multiple local models behind a single proxy that routes traffic by complexity. Here is what I found deploying it on a cheap Intel GPU.

Derek Armstrong - Payments Engineer · AI · Infrastructure
Derek Armstrong
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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 - Payments Engineer · AI · Infrastructure
Derek Armstrong
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Locking Down a DMZ Web Server with Cloudflare Tunnels featured image

Locking Down a DMZ Web Server with Cloudflare Tunnels

Hardening an internet-facing web server sitting in a home DMZ: firewall, SSH, SELinux, fail2ban, and tunnel-only traffic via Cloudflare.

Derek Armstrong - Payments Engineer · AI · Infrastructure
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 …

Derek Armstrong - Payments Engineer · AI · Infrastructure
Derek Armstrong
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Why I Use Both GitHub and Forgejo - And Why That Matters featured image

Why I Use Both GitHub and Forgejo - And Why That Matters

I use GitHub for public collaboration and Forgejo for self-hosted control. They share the same Actions workflow syntax, just in different folders. Here is why running both makes …

Derek Armstrong - Payments Engineer · AI · Infrastructure
Derek Armstrong
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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 - Payments Engineer · AI · Infrastructure
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 - Payments Engineer · AI · Infrastructure
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 - Payments Engineer · AI · Infrastructure
Derek Armstrong
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