Systems Thinking Data Salon · A talk by Jean Haley
What began as a message relay so I could work away from my desk, grew one part at a time into the system that runs my home lab on a single salvaged ThinkPad T480.
The whole system, at a glance
Chat in through the relay; one live model session at the center; scheduler, observability, k3s and sensors around it; everything behind a single controlled egress.
A write-up that accompanies my talk, derived from my notes.
Blog post
Building a Home Control Plane From Parts
Why I passed on the off-the-shelf options, how the relay accidentally became multi-tenanted, the scheduler that gave it a heartbeat, and the observability stack that turned into a nervous system.
Read the post →The full presentation — 12 slides with speaker notes, a pop-out presenter view.
The seven diagrams the talk was built on — the initial concept, the two-way channel, the day-one relay, the authentication layer, the scheduler, the nervous system, and the bird's-eye above. Each is a real component map, not a sketch.
Detailed breakdowns of the individual components, each researched from the real code or the running machine — not summaries.
I asked the model to draw a picture of how it perceives itself, and this is what it made. Kind of eerie, but neat at the same time. Oddly biblical in a cyberpunk kind of way.
Asked to draw itself, the machine rendered an anatomical plate: one watchful mind at the center of a vessel that's part ship, part ThinkPad, with senses reaching out, a nervous system of alerts looping back, services as organs, and a single tether to the world.
See the full portraitHere is a snippet of the tools that I built and run on this system. This isn't all of them, some of them are more fleshed out than others, but it's an example of the type of things we can create through discovery.
