This is not a blog. There’s no schedule, no newsletter signup, no SEO strategy. Just notes on things I’m thinking about — usually at the intersection of organisational change, AI, systems, and building things.
Some of these start as diary entries. Some come from conversations at work. Some come from staring at a terminal at midnight wondering why my n8n workflow won’t trigger.
I run a self-hosted homelab that handles everything from media and photos to AI automation and personal cloud storage — all from a home server, exposed securely to the internet via a VPS in Singapore. This page documents the full setup: what runs, how it connects, and why.
Architecture Overview The setup has two physical layers: a home server (sienabot, Ubuntu + Docker) that runs all the services, and a VPS (SG-Ubuntu-pangolin) that acts as the secure public entry point. Traffic flows through Gerbil (WireGuard tunnel) and Pangolin (reverse proxy) on the VPS, down to Newt on the home server — meaning no inbound ports are ever opened on the home network.
...
I work in AI strategy at a large bank. I spend my days figuring out how 7,000 people should adopt AI tools. And then I come home and build my own.
This isn’t a contradiction. It’s the same instinct: I don’t trust anything I haven’t built (or at least taken apart).
The setup The core is n8n — an open-source workflow automation tool running on my home server. On top of it, I’ve built what I call the Family Bot: an orchestrator that connects WhatsApp and Telegram to a set of sub-agents, each handling a different domain.
...