AWS DeepLens — Computer Vision for the House
Used AWS DeepLens in 2018 to estimate the real cost of adding ML-powered visual awareness to a home automation system — and arrived at an honest 'not yet, not cheaply' answer worth having.
What It Is
Routers, switches, and radios move packets across physical and wireless links using standardized protocols and topology-aware routing.
What This Domain Trains You To Notice
This domain is valuable because physical and infrastructure systems make constraints legible. They show how components fit together, where tolerance matters, how failure propagates, and what it takes to keep an assembly reliable over time.
Why It Transfers
The broader payoff is transfer. Once you learn to see interfaces, bottlenecks, and feedback in a physical substrate, you get better at spotting the same patterns in software, organizations, and markets. This domain gets more useful when it is compared with adjacent systems instead of being treated as a silo. That is where reusable judgment starts to form.
Related Domains
Homelab and Infrastructure
My homelab is both a workshop and a proving ground.
Photo Sharing Site — Self-Hosted
Built and ran a self-hosted photo sharing platform before cloud storage made it trivial — covering web dev, storage, auth, and the enduring question of how to make a growing photo library actually useful.
Praxis — The Magnolia Homelab
A 4-node Proxmox cluster running Kubernetes, Ceph, site-to-site VPNs to AWS, GitOps pipelines, and a full observability stack — built to test every architecture I recommend to clients.
Radio and Communication
Projects exploring radio systems, ham radio, LoRa, Meshtastic, RC control, and the infrastructure of communication at the edge of the network.
Radio Control Systems
Radio control systems have interested me since I was young — where communication, control, and motion all come together.
Radio Systems and Exploration
Radio systems are interesting to me for both personal and technical reasons.
Self Beacon Tracking (iBeacon)
Experimented with iBeacon transmitters placed around the house to track room-by-room location before indoor positioning was a product category.
The Homelab
Projects building and operating personal infrastructure — servers, clusters, networks, and the experiments that run on them.
WiFi Security Research — ESP8266 & Rotating MAC Addresses
A proof of concept using ESP8266 microcontrollers to demonstrate that rotating MAC addresses can still be fingerprinted via broadcast SSIDs.