Taggart Tech

A year on from writing "Truth in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", much of what I had feared has come to pass. In fact, in many cases things are worse than I expected.

There's nothing a user interface designer loathes more than complexity. Every design—at least, every modern design—seeks to minimize clicks, icons, visual noise. What if instead of a button, we had a borderless icon? What if instead of navigation controls, we used gestures?

And what if—hear me out—instead of search results, we had language model-distilled text delivered to you, hot and fresh?

The objective of DevOps is simplicity. But with so many moving parts, getting the Rube Goldberg machine to run without a hitch is challenging even under the best circumstances. Recently, I had a need for a rapid deployment of a LetsEncrypt-enabled web service, and I was tired of doing, well, any manual steps. So I buckled down and figured out how to get an app deployed with a real domain and a real cert in a single move.

Here's how I got it done. Hopefully this process can be of use for you.

This post is a preview of the upcoming book, The Homelab Almanac, by yours truly.

Why do you want to build a homelab?

"'Cause it seems fun," is a perfectly valid answer on a lot of levels! Unfortunately, it doesn't provide a lot of information about what equipment we need, or how we'll set it up in our home. For that, we need to dive into the nitty gritty of both intention and circumstance for your future lab.