I’m Dave. I’ve always tinkered with computers, and eventually got tired of being told what I could do with the ones I’d paid for.
Windows wore me down. macOS was better in some ways, but I still couldn’t make it feel like my own. I kept trying Linux, enjoying it for a while, then going back to Windows for games. As gaming on Linux improved, I had fewer reasons to go back. I spent a lot of time with Fedora, tried CachyOS, and eventually found Omarchy.
I like being able to change things. Sometimes that means colours. Sometimes it means finding out why something is broken and getting my hands into it. Both matter to me.
My stuff, on my own box
Self-hosting came more recently. I got tired of signing into big tech companies for all my stuff, especially OneDrive and Microsoft’s endless sign-in requirements. I wanted to run things myself, on hardware I own.
Google is still all over my life. Getting away from that is a work in progress. But I wanted more say in where my stuff lives and which services I depend on, so I started building that for myself.
The coding part surprised me
My coding experience is limited. I can read some Python and spot where things might be going wrong, but writing it from scratch has always been harder.
Using Omarchy opened my eyes to what AI coding tools could actually do. I took some courses on prompting and started trying the ideas that came to mind. A thing I’d written down one day could become a project the next. Suddenly I could build tools I’d previously have just wished somebody else would make.
That keeps me interested. I find better tools, build things that help me along the way, and keep coming up with something else to try. The freedom is amazing.
Why I write about it
Most of my friends don’t understand what I’m working on when I try to explain it, or what problems I’ve run into. So I started writing it down here: what I tried, what went wrong, and what I found out.
I also want people to see that this is possible. You can experiment. You can play around. AI coding has made it much easier to get started, and I want more people to give it a go.
You still have to pay attention. If I ship broken shit, I’m responsible for it. Having an AI write the code doesn’t get me out of understanding what it does, checking it, or dealing with the consequences.
That’s what you’ll find here: Linux, self-hosted projects, things I built with AI, and the problems I ran into while doing it. If something here gives you an idea you want to try, I’d like that.