What "AI-powered" should actually mean for a small shop
Most AI pitches to small businesses sell autonomy nobody asked for. Here is the model I would actually deploy — drafts, not decisions — worked through for a North Bay service business.
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writing/index.md
gregroy@gregsplace ~/writing $
ls -la && cat *.md
Writing
Notes on DevOps, incident response, and building sustainable engineering cultures. Short, opinionated, and written from direct experience — not the LinkedIn thought-leader version.
Passkeys for the homelab: Authelia + Windows Hello
Moving self-hosted SSO from password plus TOTP to passkeys, and the real gotchas that show up when Windows Hello meets a Cloudflare Tunnel and Caddy stack.
The app my agents built while I slept
I queued an offline-first warranty tracker as an overnight agent-fleet run and spent the next morning fixing what the agents got wrong.
The App ID graveyard: shipping an Apple Watch app from a headless CI runner
Six hidden failures that blocked a watchOS target, and what solo iOS shippers should pre-provision before adding their first watch extension.
Teaching the cheap model: a learning flywheel for AI coding agents
An expensive reviewer turns a cheap worker's mistakes into durable lessons, then injects them back into future prompts so the stateless model keeps getting better.
Putting an AI assistant on Signal (with eyes)
How I wired a self-hosted Signal bridge to a local AI assistant so the family can text it, and then gave it vision for photos.
Shipping apps solo with an AI agent fleet
Agents for throughput, a human as the reliability gate — how one operator ships iOS and Android apps to production.
Audit tournament — making AI models compete to find real bugs
Why hallucination rates differ wildly between models and why adjudication, not raw output, is the real product of a forensic AI audit.
Board email the IT team can't read
S/MIME end-to-end with board-owned keys — structural privacy, not policy privacy.
Blameless ≠ consequence-free: making post-mortems stick
Turn incidents into durable improvements without witch hunts or wheel-spinning.
From IC to leader: a lightweight mentoring path
How I help strong ICs become calm, trusted incident leaders.
The 3-pager that fixed on-call
Clarified scope, severity levels, and paging rules.
Coming up
- Runbook skeletons — how to author once and keep them useful.
- Error budgets — how they guide trade-offs.
- Preview envs — feature branches without fear.
- Project Lattice — a developer log of building a visionOS infrastructure controller.
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