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
28
posts since 2020
Open source
774★
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 28 posts

Latest writing.

Latest post

I Rebuilt My Dotfiles for the Agent That Writes Them

I don't hand-write my dotfiles anymore. An agent does. So I rebuilt them for the agent, and almost four years of Ansible went out in one commit.

Published
Reading
16 min · 3,076 words
Tags
dotfilesaiai-agentsmiseansibleomarchy

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.

homelabai
15 min read

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
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 · CloudNativePG · RustFS · Admission policies · Headlamp · Homepage · Gatus · Zot the rest is next

Hardware readout

Compute
Dell PowerEdge R73064 threads · 512 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 Oct 11, 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 414 63 Apache-2.0
Updated Oct 11, 2026

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

Python 174 9 MIT
Updated Jul 13, 2026

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

Go 148 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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