Welcome to my lab
I’ve spent a lot of time building things over the years.
Some of them have been useful. Some have been wildly over-engineered. Some have worked perfectly. Others have resulted in several hours of debugging followed by the realisation that I’d made a typo.
This site is where I’m going to document them.
Why?
There’s really 3 reasons I’ve decided to do this but ultimatly it comes down to;
- Documenting my journey and giving back to the wonderful open source communities and resources that are already out there.
- Provide a journal to myself of progress
- Give myself a reason to pickup a random project on an evening I’m in and havn’t organised to go out.
It’s different to my portfolio
My portfolio can be found at jhellier.com but this is there as a digital CV and professional history.
This site is different. It’s a workshop of experiments, good and bad. A place where I can write about the fun ideas that zip around my head. Some may never be completed, some may flop, and others may just show that even professionals spend a long time wasting time on something silly.
To give back
I want to give back to the community, sharing some of the wild ideas and things I try. But most importantly, I want to provide an additional resource of answers and documentation for the problems I’ve spent hours debugging or figuring out. Hopefully, someday, someone stumbles across this at a stressful 2AM and finds the answer they were looking for.
To document my journey
The final reason is that I do a lot of random projects. A lot get forgotten, never finished, or end up sitting in a drawer because I don’t have the time to finish them. When that happens, I forget what stage they’re at, the lessons I’ve learned, and the frustrations I had along the way. So I want to document those journeys, giving myself a reference to come back to in the future.
What will I write about?
Literally anything technical related that I’m working on. Sometimes it will be quick blog entries covering a high level, other times it will be a whole project writeup and other weeks it will just be a lesson I learnt that week. These topics might cover some of the below points but look at categories for more information. If you’re just browsing each section in the menu bar has it’s own explination of the intent and there’s further links there to read more about me.
- Home projects and DIY (sometimes)
- Electronics
- Self-hosting
- Linux
- Networking
- Servers
- Programming
- Embedded devices
- Infrastructure
- Random projects that seemed like a good idea at the time
I’m particularly interested in the intersection between software and physical things, and I’m hoping doing this will get me participating in that more. There’s something satisfying about writing some code, flashing it onto a little board, connecting a sensor and then watching something happen in the real world. Enjoy those adventures where I decide an ESP32, MQTT broker and most of my evening is the better idea than something off the shelf… It’s definitly more exciting sometimes.
Why a blog?
Because building things is more interesting when I can look back at how I got there. It’s more difficult to remember the projects that never got complete, the lessons made along the way and little discoveries that actually made the project interesting.
I’m also hoping that writing forces me to slow down and expand my knowledge even further, so I can explain things to others.
It also gives me a fun reference for future positions and discussions with people where they can see what I’ve done and pull out a common interest.
So, what’s next?
There isn’t really a grand plan or roadmap here and, honestly there probably shouldn’t be. I’m aiming to post at least weekly, even if it’s just a small update. But ultimately, whenever there’s something worth writing about, there’ll be a post.
So this is the begining of the site. Join me on the adventures and see where it goes.