A personal network.
My first computer was a 386. Naturally, I wanted a network.
I’m stifler. Husband, dad of two, principal solution architect, gamer, and someone who tends to turn a hobby into a software project.
I’ve been connecting things ever since. The important people are upstairs.
The beginning of a habit. An illustrative 386 network.
01 / The networks got bigger.
Build software. Connect things. Help people get things done.
Today I build software and connect systems and hardware to help more than 25,000 people work across over 200 sites worldwide.
From headquarters, I help make those pieces work together. Increasingly, that means finding useful places for AI and agents, too.
The title is principal solution architect. The work lives in the connections. Labeling is one small part of it.
Illustrative connections · no company locations shown.
25,000+people to enable
200+sites worldwide
Illustrative connections. Site markers do not represent employer locations.
02 / Where I learn.
Some of the next things start at home.
My house is my learning and test bench. I build things here, connect them, break them, and find out what I misunderstood.
Small enough to experiment. Real enough to teach me something.
Some lessons follow me to work. Some become products. Others help heat the house.
This place exists. Cellar, stone wall, one screen. Photographed, not rendered.Traced over the photograph, edge by edge. Same camera, same lens, no guessing.
My actual workspace · photograph and tracing
03 / A house with a few extra connections.
The desk is in one room. The rack gets a room of its own.
The 3D printer lives beside my desk. The homelab runs separately, contributing a little heat to the house along the way.
Forty-four devices give me plenty to learn from: computing, automation, cameras, and things that turn software into something physical.
One window-sensor gateway needed a radio before it would talk. The window already knew whether it was open. I felt the server deserved to know too.
Schematic house · 44 devices from the network scan.
One monitor, the computer, and a 3D printer beside the desk. Ideas become code or physical parts.
Illustrative house layout · 44 devices from the network scan · room proportions are schematic.
04 / Current obsession.
My latest hobby has a token bill.
Right now, AI takes up most of my spare technical curiosity. How much can agents build? What needs supervision? What happens if I give a small idea a fairly unreasonable amount of compute?
I give them jobs. They investigate, write code, and occasionally take an elaborate route to the wrong conclusion.
I review the work, change the instructions, and try again. The interesting part is learning what I can trust them with.
Illustrative tasks and counters. This is a demo, not my current activity.
05 / A hobby becomes a product.
staged
One desk. One screen. Several things happening.
I wanted a clean desk, a fullscreen game, and a way to keep an eye on my agents and work. staged grew out of that.
It gives the game a virtual display at a resolution I choose, then brings its picture into a window on my real monitor.
The rest of the screen stays available for agents, terminals, chat, or streaming tools. One physical monitor, with room for all of it.
Animated game demo · change the resolution
Illustrative layout · the game runs on a virtual display.
06 / A bigger experiment.
openlabelengine
How far could I take industrial software with agents?
I had watched labeling software become expensive and increasingly subscription-based. I wanted to make it easy and affordable again.
openlabelengine grew out of that mission. It designs and prints industrial labels: barcodes, shipping labels, and the information that travels with physical things.
The core is open source. The same rendering code produces the preview and the raster sent to the printer.
When the cellar printer is ready, you can send it a small job. A camera checks the printed code and brings back the proof.
Printer illustration · use the cellar printer dialog for a real job.
07 / A few things escaped the cellar.
I enjoy building all of this.
Gaming gives me ideas. The 3D printer gives some of them a shape. Indie hacking gives others a domain name.
Once, an app for nine people to split a stag weekend’s costs. It has a toggle called bachelor rule. Still on.
There will be another idea. There usually is. But I want the things I build to keep working when I leave the desk.
Margin notes. Definitely not a manual.
The old cheat code still works: ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A.
On a phone? The engineering department has approved this button.
Try “stifler” in the label printer. Even the printer has boundaries.
Make room for a game and everything around it.
↗02 / THE EXPERIMENTopenlabelengineSee how far agents and an idea can go.
↗An expense app with one particularly important toggle.
ONSmall projects. Real reasons to build them.
08 / The important people are upstairs.
Because there are people I want to leave it for.
My work helps support my family. The projects give my curiosity somewhere to go. I want both to make room for the life around them.
There’s my wife. There are two kids getting taller than the pencil marks on the cellar doorframe.
There’s a lake outside.
Two kids, one wife, one cellar, two products. In that order.
The machines can keep the cellar.
Two kids, one wife, one cellar, two products. In that order.