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A Self-Hosted Modern Data Stack Under €200/Month
How I ran the modern data stack — ClickHouse, dbt, Dagster, Iceberg — self-hosted on Hetzner for under €200/month instead of €1,000+ managed.
Latest Posts - 103
Where Home Assistant Runs: One Small VM, Measured
A 7 euro cloud VM running Home Assistant in Docker: memory, boot and disk measured, why not Kubernetes, and what a data-centre machine cannot do.
Home Assistant Themes: Six Installed and Compared
Six theme repos give you 74 selectable themes. Which need card-mod, why LCARS does not look like LCARS, and how HACS 2.x changed where you find them.
Auditing an Open-Source Ecosystem: 1,434 Repos
A reproducible recipe for checking whether an ecosystem is as open as it claims: the GitHub sweep, the filter matrix, and what a licence check finds.
Home Assistant Dashboards Built From Stock Cards
Two dashboards I actually use, built only from cards Home Assistant ships with — no themes, no plugins. Layout, gauge config and where the stock cards stop.
Rebuilding Home Assistant From Backup: a Timed Run
I rebuilt my Home Assistant host on a fresh VM with a stopwatch. It took about 50 minutes, and two steps were missing from every backup archive.
Backing Up Home Assistant: the Config Folder Isn't Enough
A config-only backup restores Home Assistant but not the host: VPN keys, firewall, cron and the container definition belong in the archive too.
dbt on ClickHouse: Project Layout and the Gotchas
How I structure a dbt Core project against ClickHouse — staging/intermediate/marts, layer-per-database, incremental models, and the ClickHouse-specific gotchas.
Running ClickHouse on a Dedicated Server, Backed Up Right
Why I run ClickHouse on a dedicated box instead of Kubernetes, the trade-offs, and how to back it up without corrupting your MergeTree parts.
Updating Home Assistant in Docker Safely: My Workflow With Backup, Test and Rollback
How I update a Docker-based Home Assistant to a new version without breaking my smart home: full backup, update custom components first against the old core, recreate the container instead of in-place, note the image ID for a real rollback, and a post-update checklist.
A Home Assistant Energy Dashboard, Built Piece by Piece
How I turned raw inverter registers into a real Home Assistant energy dashboard: reading, monitoring and acting on solar surplus, battery and switching.