Portrait of Matthew, aka TechDufus

You can call me Dufus.

Platform Engineer / Agentic Engineer

Hello from the command line

I break things, fix them, and write down what actually worked.

Platform engineering notes from a guy who lives in tmux. Real incidents, homelab rebuilds, and AI agent experiments.

Writing
27
posts since 2020
Open source
773★
across 4 repos
Production
200-node
AKS in production [1]
Portrait of Matthew, aka TechDufus
You can call me Dufus.Matthew · @TechDufusPlatform Engineer / Agentic Engineer
KubernetesHomelabAI agentsGitOpsTalosTerraformPowerShellIncident notes
01WritingAll 27 posts

Latest writing.

Latest post

I Rebuilt My Homelab for an AI Operator

I didn't add AI to my homelab. I scorched it and rebuilt it from bare metal so an agent could run it, and picked every tool for the operator instead of for me.

Published
Reading
15 min · 2,926 words
Tags
homelabaiai-agentskubernetestalosflux

From Hardware RAID to ZFS on My R720xd

I pulled the RAID card from my R720xd, put in an HBA330, and rebuilt Proxmox on three ZFS pools without buying a single new drive.

homelabproxmox
10 min read

Deploying Obsidian Sync for My AI Agents

I set up Obsidian Sync for AI agents in a terminal-only Ubuntu Server environment using the official CLI and a continuous systemd service, then retired my old GUI workaround.

obsidiansync
3 min read

The AI Internet Outage We're Not Ready For

I think we are underestimating how close we are to a tipping-point outage where failure in core internet systems cascades far beyond one provider incident.

aiinternet
5 min read

AI Already Took My Job

AI already took my job. I just adapted fast enough that nobody noticed.

devopsai
9 min read
02The labRebuild in progress

The lab.

One server, three Talos nodes, all of it in git. Mid-rebuild.

Proxmox VE 9.2 on ZFSTalos ×3Cilium · metrics-server · Flux · cert-manager · External Secrets · Proxmox CSI · VictoriaMetrics + VictoriaLogs + Grafana · Headlamp the rest is next

Hardware readout

Compute
Dell PowerEdge R720xd40 threads · 128 GB
Network
UDM Pro + U7 ProGateway and firewall
Storage
UniFi UNAS Pro 8NFS storage over 10 GbE
Edge
Raspberry Pi 4 Model BThe control node
03ProjectsLive from GitHub · built Sep 29, 2026

Things I build.

YahwAI

Opening soon

Search the Scriptures. Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus.

My terminal-first environment: tmux, Neovim, shell tooling, and scripts that keep my daily workflow fast.

Shell 413 64 Apache-2.0
Updated Sep 29, 2026

I built this after hitting the same Claude Code friction over and over. Opinionated defaults, still fully hackable.

Python 175 9 MIT
Updated Jul 13, 2026

Terminal-native Kanban for tracking parallel agent tasks without leaving tmux.

Go 147 16 AGPL-3.0
Updated Jun 12, 2026

My old homelab as code: Terraform, k3s and Argo CD. Retired in September 2026, when I rebuilt the lab for an AI operator.

Shell 38 5 MIT
Updated Feb 20, 2026
04About

Hello, I'm TechDufus.

I'm Matthew, but most people online know me as TechDufus. I started in PowerShell, worked my way through DevOps, full-stack and platform engineering, and now I build with AI and teach others to.

If I repeat something twice, I script it on the third pass.

More about me
Production Scale

200-node AKS + 100TB+ data platform[1]

The architecture is written up publicly.

Secure Delivery

High-security + air-gapped platform operations[2]

GitOps and compliance in high-stakes environments.

Agentic Work

Multi-agent workflows with human ownership

Fast iteration with explicit review and rollback.

  1. Secure Low-Latency Queries at Scale with Raft Data Platform — teamraft.com ↗
  2. Related coverage: Fighter pilots take directions from AI in Pentagon's groundbreaking test — foxnews.com ↗
05Contact

Say hey.

Questions, ideas, work, or a good DNS horror story. Email's fastest.

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