I run a hybrid networking setup that combines Tailscale (a mesh VPN), Traefik (a cloud-native reverse proxy), and a private CA powered by OpenBao (an open-source secret management and PKI solution forked from HashiCorp Vault). In this post, I’ll explain why I chose this architecture and how the pieces fit together.

I’m now officially a Happy engineer! In this post, I’ll explain what Happy is, why I decided to self-host it, and how my setup works. I’ll also share practical details about my LLM provider strategy, workspace configuration, and the lessons I learned along the way. Happy is becoming more than just a tool—it’s evolving into my primary development environment. With MCP tool integration and remote development capabilities, I rarely need a traditional IDE setup anymore.

Having a few Raspberry Pi 4s at my disposal, I found myself somewhat dissatisfied with their processing capabilities and power management features. This led me to explore alternative solutions, particularly given the collection of old smartphones gathering dust in my drawer. These devices, while outdated for daily use, still pack considerable computing power. In this article, I’ll walk through how I transformed these old smartphones into a functional Kubernetes cluster using postmarketOS, giving them a second life as computing nodes.