https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/Recent content in Notes on thornbushHugo -- gohugo.ioen© 2026 [thornbush.nl](https://notes.thornbush.nl)Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/the-cost-of-ownership/Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/the-cost-of-ownership/Security patches, a power cut, a mail header mismatch, and a breaking change that almost wasn’t caught. The unglamorous work of keeping a system running.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/everything-you-ever-saved/Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/everything-you-ever-saved/Eight hundred gigabytes of family history. Thousands of documents. The work of deciding what belongs where — and to whom.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/moving-in/Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/moving-in/Building a control panel for a system you operate. Building a public voice for a project you believe in. Both are the same gesture.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/the-assumption-that-broke-the-architecture/Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/the-assumption-that-broke-the-architecture/A security layer that had never worked. A decision record rewritten the same day it was written. And the discipline that made both discoveries possible.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/cutting-the-last-wire/Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/cutting-the-last-wire/Replacing a commercial tunnel service sounds like a single decision. It turns out to be a chain of seven.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/running-is-not-the-same-as-working/Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/running-is-not-the-same-as-working/A week of discovering what was silently broken — and making failure visible.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/half-a-terabyte-of-family-history/Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/half-a-terabyte-of-family-history/Before you can migrate your photos, you need to know where they all are. That turns out to be the harder problem.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/part-ii-making-it-yours/Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/part-ii-making-it-yours/Part I ended with a working stack. Part II begins with a harder question: what does it mean to actually use it?https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/just-the-beginning/Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/just-the-beginning/Nine phases. One month. What it actually means to build infrastructure for your family.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/flipping-the-switch/Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/flipping-the-switch/Nine phases of building. One evening of proving it actually works.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/making-it-production-ready/Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/making-it-production-ready/On the difference between a stack that works and one that is ready for a family. URL migration across six layers without downtime, split-horizon DNS, a CrowdSec that had been silently broken for weeks, and three network architecture decisions that will govern the next five years.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/what-if-it-breaks/Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/what-if-it-breaks/On backup gaps nobody noticed, a break-glass matrix for nine services, an Authentik misconfiguration that locked out every user including the admin, and writing a recovery document for someone who is not you.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/filling-the-stack/Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/filling-the-stack/One week, three services: file storage, photo management, and a financial administration stack built from scratch. On pragmatic exceptions, a data model that grew to fifty entities, and a backup drive that had never been in fstab.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/the-wiki-and-the-ledger/Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/the-wiki-and-the-ledger/On documentation as infrastructure, the fragility of OIDC under URL migration, why Firefly III failed a single architectural test, and the beginning of a financial data model that grew more ambitious than expected.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/learning-out-loud/Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/learning-out-loud/On tracking your own learning while building — two frameworks, one honest question, and why a consultant who manages IT programmes for a living needed a structured way to admit what he didn’t know.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/opening-the-door-carefully/Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/opening-the-door-carefully/On the tension between privacy infrastructure and connecting it to the internet, the first time the server worked from outside the house, and why monitoring is always the last thing you build and the first thing you wish you’d built earlier.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/the-constitution/Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/the-constitution/On writing a strategic framework before anything works, revising it when it becomes honest, and why three documents together — constitution, architecture, and baseline — are the difference between a project and a system.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/the-foundation/Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/the-foundation/Seven days building the base stack — PostgreSQL, Vaultwarden, Authentik, CrowdSec, BorgBackup — and the question of why large organisations can’t do what one person can do on a Saturday afternoon.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/starting-before-youre-ready/Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/starting-before-youre-ready/On buying hardware before you’re ready, over-documenting before a single cable is connected, and the unexpected satisfaction of getting the basics right on a Saturday afternoon.https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/why-i-built-a-server/Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://notes.thornbush.nl/notes/why-i-built-a-server/On digital sovereignty, family continuity, and why I started building again after years of handing my digital life to Big Tech.