Systems Engineer · Builder · Homelabber
I build systems.
Infrastructure. Automation. Software. AI.
I'm Ben — a Senior Systems Engineer by trade, and a compulsive builder outside of it. This site is where the infrastructure, automation, software, and AI-agent projects live, alongside the writing and the notebook of things I'm still testing.
Current Operations
TESTING
Nous Research Hermes, self-hosted
Just deployed — Proxmox + webhook access, no IaC yet
RUNNING
Homelab, self-hosted stack
Media, monitoring, and Loom in production
BUILDING
Per-service agent rules
What's safe to touch autonomously, and when
LEARNING
Coolify deployment patterns
Multi-service Docker Compose in production
Selected Systems
Software
activeGoogle Review Intelligence
Single-admin internal tool that manually triggers Google review scrapes, imports them idempotently, and turns the result into rating trends, phrase analysis, and formula-safe CSV exports.
Next.js · TypeScript · PostgreSQL · Prisma · pg-boss · DataForSEO · Apify · Docker
Updated 2026-09-23
AI / Agents
experimentalHomelab playground: Nous Research Hermes
Just deployed the Nous Research Hermes model into the homelab as a testbed — giving it terminal-level Proxmox access, webhook events, and per-service rules to see how far tool-using LLM judgment actually goes.
Nous Research Hermes · Proxmox · Uptime Kuma · n8n · Docker
Updated 2026-09-19
Software
maintainedLead Qualification System
Split-service pipeline that imports local business leads, scores each one on website opportunity, and syncs only the ones a human approves to HubSpot.
Next.js · TypeScript · PostgreSQL · Prisma · Redis · BullMQ · Docker
Updated 2026-05-16
Software
maintainedLoom — Real-Time Site Structure Visualizer
A distributed crawler that maps a site into a live, physics-based graph — pages settle into orbit around their hubs as the crawl runs, streamed over Socket.io in real time.
Next.js · TypeScript · Redis · BullMQ · Socket.io · Docker · Coolify
Updated 2026-05-15
Areas of Work
Latest Writing
Building Agent-Ready Surfaces for Information
How to structure a page, doc set, or API so AI agents can actually find, parse, and correctly cite what you publish — and why that's a different job than SEO.
Using Agents to Operate Self-Made Platforms
Notes from letting Claude Code and similar agents run the systems I've built, not just write their code — where that works, where it breaks, and what it takes to make a platform safe to operate this way.
Data Talks: Let Your Data Do the Decision Making
A practitioner's case for building decisions around instrumented, observable data instead of gut checks — plus the honest limits of that approach, like Goodhart's law and survivorship bias.
Stack Snapshot
Identity & Access
- Entra ID
- Conditional Access
- Okta
- SSO/SAML
Endpoint & Security
- Intune
- Microsoft Defender
- Autopilot
- CrowdStrike
Cloud & Infrastructure
- Azure
- Microsoft 365
- Proxmox
- Terraform
Networking
- VLANs
- pfSense/OPNsense
- VPN
- DNS
Automation
- PowerShell
- Microsoft Graph API
- Azure Automation
- Zapier
Software
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
AI / Agents
- Claude
- MCP
- Ollama
- LangChain
Homelab
- Docker
- Kubernetes (k3s)
- Ceph
- Prometheus / Grafana