OddWired

Latest — 17 Oct 2025

From Idea to Deployment: AI-Assisted Development in Practice

I've been curious about building a WhatsApp bot for a while now—specifically, one that doesn't rely on the official WhatsApp Business API. The official route requires a lengthy approval process that's impractical for hobby projects. Plus, I enjoy a good challenge. I had

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Part 4 - Monitoring and Observability in My Homelab

This is the last part of my four-part homelab series. So far, I’ve talked about why I built my homelab, how I handle networking, and how I run software and virtualization. In this post, I’ll close things out by talking about monitoring and observability — the stuff that helps

Building a WhatsApp Bot in My Homelab

Getting Curious One of the things I enjoy most about my homelab is that it gives me the freedom to tinker with random ideas. Not every project has to be serious or production-grade. Sometimes I just follow my curiosity to see where it leads. This time, that curiosity took me

Part 3 - Virtualization and Running Software in My Homelab

Back in part 1, I laid the groundwork by talking about the hardware that makes up my homelab. In part 2, I moved on to networking and how I got all the pieces talking to each other. This post picks up from there and shifts focus to the next layer—

Automating My Blog-to-LinkedIn Workflow

As much as this blog is meant to be like a journal for my hobbies, I still want to reach a wider audience. I’m not active on social media and it takes a lot of work to be consistent with posts while keeping up with everything else. It occurred

Part 2 — Networking in My Homelab

Networking is the backbone of the homelab. If the network is wonky, nothing else matters. In this post I’ll walk through how I connect the lab to the internet, how I control access, and how I expose services safely — plus why I chose the Cloudflare + DigitalOcean approach and how

Monitoring and Securing My Web Server with ntopng and CrowdSec

A practical setup for network observability and proactive defense on a self-hosted server. Background I run a web server (Ubuntu) that’s exposed to the internet — multiple apps and dashboards sit behind Nginx Proxy Manager. With growing exposure, I needed two things: * Visibility into what’s hitting my network * Protection

Building My Playground(Part 1): An Introduction to My Homelab

Back in 2022, a few months into a new role at a large corporation, I quickly ran into a wall. Every time I wanted to experiment, spin up or get access to a test VM or even run a simple script, there was bureaucracy waiting: change approvals, limited access rights

Running Your Own Mail Server with Maddy: A Practical Guide

So I was just tinkering around when I started this blog. I came across Ghost around this time last year (2024). I set it up and then forgot about it. Recently, when I decided to start writing, I tried logging in from a different device than the one I used

Weekend Project: Adding AI to the Homelab

Over the weekend, I finally scratched an itch I’d had for a while: running AI in my homelab. After doing a bit of research, I settled on some decent hardware and got everything set up. With the new gear ready to go, I dove into spinning up local AI