About

I've been writing code since the late '90s — got my first paid gig in 1997, getting dropped off from driver's ed at a web development shop. The early internet was a different place, and learning to build things on it back then meant figuring out a lot of stuff the hard way. That instinct stuck.

Nearly three decades later, the day job has changed but the impulse hasn't: take something apart, understand how it works, build something better. dwot.io is where I write about the projects that come out of that — mostly homelab infrastructure, self-hosted software, and the kind of tinkering that starts with "I wonder if I could…" and ends with a new Docker container running at 2 AM.

What this blog covers

The short version: I run a homelab and I build things on it. The longer version involves a lot of Docker containers, a self-hosted GitLab instance with CI/CD pipelines, a multi-NAS storage setup that's been through three generations of hardware, and a growing collection of Go services that do everything from streaming a live feed of my grow tent to managing a full cultivation journal.

Some of the recurring themes here:

  • Homelab infrastructure — networking, storage, compute, and the endless quest to make it all talk to each other reliably
  • Self-hosted everything — if there's a SaaS product doing something I need, there's a good chance I've tried to replace it with something running on my own hardware
  • Project deep-dives — detailed write-ups on things I've built, how they work under the hood, and what I learned along the way
  • The tinkering itself — the process of going from a half-formed idea to a working system, including the dead ends and the 3 AM debugging sessions

The name

The name "dwot" comes from Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch — the one where, after an exhaustive and fruitless exchange about every cheese known to man, the shopkeeper finally admits he's been deliberately wasting the customer's time. The phrase stuck with me, and by the late '90s it had become a username, a domain name, and eventually a whole identity.

The first incarnation was DeliberateWasteOfTime.com — dwot.com — which ran from roughly 2003 to 2005. It was essentially a proto-Digg: a curated index of weird internet links before that concept had a proper name. People would send in the best strange corners of the web they'd found, or I'd pull things off Blogdex and other early link aggregators. The homepage was a dark-backgrounded, orange-accented PHP site with a rotating quote widget (it grew from 47 entries to 81 over the site's life — Cake, Stephen King, the Grateful Dead), a "Wastes" feed of curated links, a blog sidebar, forums, and even a dwot Shop. The forums and blog never got much traction, but the link feed had its own little corner of weird-internet regulars. It was peak mid-2000s web — the kind of site you'd find through StumbleUpon and bookmark for lunch breaks.

If you're curious, some of it still lives on the Wayback Machine.

Two decades later, dwot.io is a very different site — focused on homelab tech instead of internet oddities — but the name's been around since the '90s and the underlying spirit hasn't changed much. Most of what I build here, nobody asked for. It's a deliberate waste of time, and that's still the point.

The setup

Everything I write about runs on actual hardware in my house. The homelab started the way most do — an old gaming rig running XBMC next to the TV — and grew over about twenty years into a proper rack with dedicated servers, managed switches, and more spinning rust than any reasonable person needs. If you're reading this and nodding along, you're probably the target audience.

Elsewhere

You can find me on Bluesky for the less structured version of all this.