Notes
Short posts covering decisions, lessons learned, and observations from building and operating infrastructure. Each note captures a specific insight or trade-off encountered during real work.
Shipping Markdown on Workers Without Parsing at Runtime
How this site's markdown pipeline moved from per-request parsing inside a Cloudflare Worker to build-time compilation with a Vite plugin, and what it bought.
Seven Demo Sites, Zero Shared Template
How the demo showcase on valkyrienexus.com keeps seven fictional businesses from looking like one layout with seven coats of paint: design from the emotional job, one signature moment each, identical engineering underneath.
The Turnstile Widget That Never Renders
Why a Cloudflare Turnstile widget inside a multi-step form silently fails verification, and the explicit-render pattern that fixed the valkyrienexus.com booking form.
The Missing SPF Record That's Supposed to Be Missing
Why sales@ mail was landing in Outlook junk, the three sender profiles I standardized across every domain, and why a 'missing root SPF' finding on a Resend domain is correct.
Your CSP Header Isn't Shipping: Nonces on Streamed SSR
How SolidStart's onBeforeResponse hook silently dropped my Content-Security-Policy headers, why a Cloudflare Transform Rule masked the failure, and the curl check that finally exposed it.
I Built the Same App Three Times
The C² Faction HQ lineage: a Next.js monolith in five containers, a 28-service Rust rewrite, and the deliberate retreat to one binary. A retrospective on matching architecture weight to actual load.
Your Images Are Bundling Into Your Worker
How Nitro base64-inlines public/ images into server chunks on Cloudflare Workers, the deploy-script workaround I use on every client site, and the WebP rule that prevents the problem upstream.
I Ran a SIEM in My Homelab, Then Pulled It
Why Wazuh earned a place in a single-operator homelab, what signal actually mattered at home scale, and why it came back out when the hardware reality caught up.
VA-Claims: Designing for Data That Can't Leave the Machine
Design decisions behind a fully-local VA disability claims assistant: what the privacy constraint rules out, what it forces, and what it costs in capability.
Multi-Agent Homelab Automation: What Worked and What Was Overkill
Design decisions from valkyrie-ai-agents, the multi-agent orchestration system I built for homelab automation, and an honest accounting of which parts earned their complexity.
SolidStart + Three.js: Technical Decisions for This Site
Why I chose SolidStart over Next.js and raw Three.js over wrapper libraries for a 3D portfolio site, and every major technical trade-off along the way.
SSH Management Suite: Design Decisions
Why I built a custom SSH management CLI in pure Bash, and the design choices behind key generation, config management, and connection lifecycle tooling.
Why Cloudflare Tunnels Over Traditional VPN
The reasoning behind choosing Cloudflare Tunnels for external access to homelab services, and what it replaces in the security model.
Why Authentik Over Authelia
Decision analysis comparing Authentik and Authelia for identity-aware access control in a homelab environment, and why Authentik won despite higher resource cost.