Welcome to my blog. Here, I write about technology, community events in Whitehorse, and my experiences working in technology.
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Claude Fable 5: Anthropic Unlocks Their Most Capable Model Yet
Anthropic just did something fascinating. They officially unlocked their legendary, high-end “Mythos” model class to the public under a new name: Claude Fable 5.
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ARM's Server Takeover: Is It Time to Dump x86 in the Data Center?
A few weeks ago I wrote about the big three CPU architectures x86, ARM, and RISC-V and how each one approaches computing from a completely different philosophy. That post covered the basics. This one is a direct follow-up, because the ARM story in the enterprise space has gotten too big...
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GNOME vs KDE Plasma vs XFCE: My Honest Take on the Big Three Desktop Environments
Let’s talk about desktop environments (DEs). It’s the ultimate Linux rabbit hole. You install a distro, you get bored, you hop to another, and suddenly you’re spending three hours configuring panel transparency instead of actually working.
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Battle of the Architectures: RISC-V, ARM, and x86 (And My Quest for Real Silicon)
Hey everyone! Today we are diving into the ultimate tech showdown: the battle of CPU architectures. If you’ve ever wondered what makes your phone run cool while your gaming PC sounds like a jet engine taking off—or why the tech world is suddenly obsessed with an open-source newcomer called RISC-V—you’re...
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Ubuntu 26.04 LTS: Meet the Resolute Raccoon
Canonical just dropped Ubuntu 26.04 LTS — aka the Resolute Raccoon — and it’s easily the most ambitious Long Term Support release we’ve seen in years. If you’re running 24.04, or if you’ve been sitting on the fence waiting for a rock-solid milestone to upgrade your setup, this is the...
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Claude Code Meets WordPress: The Good, The Bad, and The Automated
Alright, let’s talk about something I’ve been experimenting with: hooking up Claude Code to a WordPress site through GitHub Actions. It sounds like a “why would you do that?” kind of setup — but once it clicks, it genuinely changes how fast you can move on a content site. This...
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Beers, Bikes, and Big Ben
Everyone needs a fun vacation. We came back a couple of weeks ago from our awesome family vacation across the pond. It was a mix of historical sites, amazing food, and a lot of football. I am thankful for my family, who are very supportive of our adventures. I am...
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Kubernetes Without the Headache: A Deep Dive into Rancher
Hey everyone! If you’ve ever tried to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters across different clouds (or even just on-prem), you know it can quickly turn into a “who-can-pull-their-hair-out-fastest” contest.
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Postgres: The Database That Just Won't Quit
If you’ve spent more than five minutes in web development, you’ve probably heard people rave about PostgreSQL (or just “Postgres” if you’re among friends). It’s often called the “world’s most advanced open-source relational database,” which sounds a bit like marketing speak, but in this case, the hype is actually real....
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LXC: The 'Goldilocks' of Virtualization
Ever felt like Docker is a bit too restrictive for your needs, but firing up a full-blown Virtual Machine (VM) feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut?
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Ceph: The Storage Giant That Does Everything
If you’ve been hanging around the world of software-defined storage (SDS) for more than five minutes, you’ve definitely heard of Ceph. It’s the “big boss” of storage—highly scalable, incredibly resilient, and, let’s be honest, a little bit intimidating at first.
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Ubuntu MicroCloud: A Private Cloud for the Rest of Us
If you’ve ever looked at a stack of old NUCs or spare PCs in the corner of your room and thought, “I should turn that into a mini data center,” you aren’t alone. Setting up a private cloud usually means wrestling with massive enterprise tools, but Canonical’s MicroCloud is designed...
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Why I’m Finally Testing Out Caddy: The 'Set It and Forget It' Web Server
Let’s be real for a second: setting up a web server is usually the part of a project I dread the most. Usually, it involves wrestling with Nginx config syntax, manually setting up Certbot for SSL, and then crossing my fingers that the auto-renewal doesn’t break three months from now....
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VS Code Showdown 2026: Is Gemini Code Assist Actually Good?
If you aren’t using AI for coding by now, are you even a dev in 2026? I’ve spent some time letting Gemini Code Assist drive my VS Code setup. After the big “Gemini 3” update, the game has changed, but it’s still a wild west out there.
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Ansible Review: Banishing the Bash Script Spaghetti
We’ve all been there. You have a handful of servers, and you need to install Nginx, tweak a few config files, and set up a database. So, you write a massive, 300-line Bash script. It works great… until it fails halfway through, and you have to figure out what broke...
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Minikube Review: Kubernetes on Your Laptop
If you’ve ever tried to learn Kubernetes, you probably hit the “Cloud Bill Shock” phase pretty early. Spinning up a managed cluster on AWS or GCP just to test a “Hello World” app feels like overkill (and hurts the wallet).
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Claude Code Review Part 3: The Magic's Limits
So, I’ve been living in the terminal with Claude Code for a bit now. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s basically Anthropic’s way of putting a junior engineer inside your CLI on IDE (Integrated Development Enviroenment). It can search your files, run your tests, and actually write code instead...
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Claude Code Review Part 2: The Joy of Local Development
There is a unique, quiet satisfaction in building something that bridges the gap between modern technology and personal history. Recently, I’ve been diving deep into the development of the Family Tree App, an open-source project designed to help families visualize and preserve their lineages. While the project itself is rewarding,...
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Claude Code Review Part 1: Claude Code—The Terminal-First AI Architect
So, I finally took the plunge and spent the weekend with Claude Code in VS Code. I was recently influenced by the latest Hard Fork podcast about Claude Code. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s Anthropic’s new “agentic” tool that lives in your terminal. It doesn’t just suggest code;...
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k3s: Kubernetes, But Make It Lightweight ☁️
Let’s be real: setting up “standard” Kubernetes (K8s) can feel like a full-time job. Between the massive resource requirements and the mountain of components, it’s often overkill for smaller projects.
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Hardware Review: Raspberry Pi 5, Tiny Titan
Raspberry 5 It’s been a long wait since the Raspberry Pi 4 dropped in 2019. In tech years, that’s basically a decade. But the Raspberry Pi 5 is finally here, and I’ve spent the last few months throwing everything I can at it.
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Hypervisor Review: Proxmox, Homelab Made Simple
What is Proxmox? In plain English? It’s an operating system based on Debian Linux that turns your computer into a server that runs other computers (Virtual Machines) and lightweight apps (Containers). You install it on bare metal, access a web dashboard from your laptop, and start spinning up instances of...
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Desktop OS Review: Debian 13 'Trixie', The Toy Dinosaur Roars
It’s been a few months since Debian 13 “Trixie” hit the stable channel back in August 2025, and now that we’re already on point release 13.2, I’ve had plenty of time to break it, fix it, and live with it.
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OS Review: Ubuntu 25.10 'Questing Quokka' – A Rust-y New World?
So, the Questing Quokka (Ubuntu 25.10) has been hopping around on my drive for a few weeks now. Since the dust has settled on the October release, I figured it was time to talk about whether this short-term release is worth your time or if you should stick to the...
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NGINX Reverse Proxy: The Unsung Hero of Your Stack
If you’ve spun up a web server in the last decade, you’ve probably copy-pasted an NGINX config file. It’s the bread and butter of the internet. Today, I’m taking a look at the NGINX Reverse Proxy.
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Azure Pipelines Review: The Enterprise Workhorse
Let’s be honest for a moment. When you think of “cool” CI/CD tools in 2025, your mind probably jumps to GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or maybe some niche tool that only runs on Arch Linux. Azure Pipelines? It feels a bit like the dad of the bunch. It wears a...
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ArgoCD Review: The GitOps Shepherd Your Cluster Needs
If you’ve been manually kubectl apply-ing your manifests like a caveman, or trusting a fragile Jenkins pipeline to push changes to your cluster, we need to talk.
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The Good, the Bad, and the Templating: Helm
If you’ve spent more than a week with Kubernetes, you’ve probably faced “YAML-fatigue.” You start by copy-pasting a deployment.yaml and a service.yaml. Soon, you need a configmap.yaml, a secret.yaml, and an ingress.yaml. Before you know it, you’re managing 12 different YAML files for a single application, and deploying to staging...
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A Casual Look at Prometheus
If you’re in the Kubernetes or cloud-native world, you can’t throw a stone without hitting someone who is using Prometheus for monitoring. It’s the de facto standard, the default, the “just install it already” tool that everyone seems to rely on.
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So You Need TLS on Kubernetes? A Casual Review of cert-manager
If you’ve ever run anything on Kubernetes, you know that “just running the app” is only half the battle. The other half is networking, and a huge part of that is securing your services with TLS (you know, the ‘S’ in HTTPS). Manually creating and renewing SSL certificates is a...
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Update Post: My Plan to Build a Real-Life Moving Painting
My partner is a huge Harry Potter fan. So, naturally, I’ve been thinking of ways to bring a little bit of that Hogwarts magic into our home. My latest crazy idea? To build one of the iconic moving paintings from the movies.
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Kube Vip: Easy HA and Load Balancing for Your K8s Cluster
Hey everyone! If you’re running Kubernetes, especially on-prem, bare-metal, or at the edge, you know that getting traffic into your cluster can be a pain. Setting up high availability (HA) for your control plane or getting a LoadBalancer service to work without a fancy cloud provider’s magic is tricky.
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Project Hogwarts: My Plan to Build a Real-Life Moving Painting
My partner is a huge Harry Potter fan. So, naturally, I’ve been thinking of ways to bring a little bit of that Hogwarts magic into our home. My latest crazy idea? To build one of the iconic moving paintings from the movies.
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My Plan to Blog Every Week Like It's the 2000s
You know how it is. You have a ton of cool ideas, projects you’re working on, and things you want to share. But then life happens. I’ve been wanting to write more on here, but I always get stuck trying to make every post “perfect,” which usually means nothing ever...
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Creating Alser.ca
Welcome to a behind-the-scenes look at my new website, Alser.ca! Building it with Jekyll was a fun challenge, and I wanted to share the story of how this project came to life. We’ll dive into the helpful tools I used, some of the key lessons I picked up along the...
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