Howdy!
About Me
I'm Cole, Cole Kujawa. There, now we ain't strangers anymore.
First and foremost, no I'm not a captain. I did live on a boat though, and my folks do now, but we aren't boats. That would be ridiculous.
This is the second iteration of my self hosted blogfolio, built to be more flexible and extensible than my last. With each new iteration of projects I work on I learn so much. Which is what motivates me to build these sites and more.
I desperately need to understand how things work, and frankly, software is easy to understand when you rtfm. High level languages have rigorous definitions but they’re declarative, every function is defined, their intentions are clear, which makes them simple to understand.
The Home Lab
I spend a lot of time working on my home lab. It's a massive project I’ve been cultivating for over a decade. Built largely as infrastructure as code with bolt on customizations. After manually provisioning my Ubuntu server dozens of times I put together a bash script to manage it all, a full initialization, configuring IP Tables, UFW, DNS, SSH, kernel hardening, designed to be consistent and easily repeatable. This functions as the foundation for what is my smart-tilde docker compose stack and many other stacks.
In the picture of the monitors you may be able to make out Netdata on the left monitor, Heimdall and Portainer on the middle monitor, and Dozzle on the right. Those apps cover the majority of monitoring, management, and accessing the core services of my home lab.
Why Do Any of It?
I'm a huge proponent of FOSS. Without it I would be doing nothing with this site. 95% of my projects piggyback off projects where someone else has laid the groundwork for me. The reality is in this day and age, when it comes to software, whatever you want to do, someone has probably already done, published to github, and released it under a free license.
Any time I hear about a new open source container that piques my interest, I’m trying it out. Sometimes I get stuck on a specific problem in my life, and I think, how could I solve this with software.
So what really motivates me to do all this? A lot of curiosity and the ability to contribute to something greater.
Recent Posts
If you’re using LLMs, I would wager you probably don’t need the level of precision you’re paying for.
Discover how to leverage n8n's workflow automation capabilities to generate content in a headless CMS, powered by locally hosted LLMs