The bottom turtle is a hardware key
Encrypting secrets into git is the easy half — the hard half is what opens the first door, and that chain has to bottom out in something you can't copy.
Nicholas Romero
Personal site and blog of Nicholas Romero — software engineer, full-stack developer, and technology enthusiast.
Latest posts
Projected git graph planning
A mildly retrocausal planning notation — pin the next minor release and it reaches back to decide which feature you commit today.
Book report: Patanjali's Yoga Sutras
A book report on Patanjali's Yoga Sutras for my yoga teacher training at Loveland Yoga.
Parametric 3D Sensor Placement with Integrated Routing: A Unified Substrate for Heterogeneous COTS Modules
A parametric methodology that collapses PCB layout, cable-harness routing, and mechanical enclosure into a single 3D-printed substrate, with arbitrary 3D sensor orientation as a first-class design parameter.
Extracting Data from Hand-Drawn 1970 NASA Charts with Claude Fable
I needed numbers that exist only as a hand-drawn curve in a fifty-year-old Apollo report. The manual digitizers didn't scale and the automatic ones choke on annotation arrows — so Claude Fable, Anthropic's newest model, wrote its own tracer and verified it by looking at its own output.
The Entire Docs Site Is One HTML File
A single HTML file fetches markdown from GitHub's Contents API, renders it with marked.js, and deploys on Vercel with clean URL rewrites. Zero build step, zero dependencies.
Hot Keys and Hardware Keys for Agentic Workflows
Scoping SSH Access Without Killing Your Productivity
Your Notes Repo Is a Control Plane
Notes that span projects need their own repo. When they get one, it becomes the control plane for everything — including AI agents.
Budget-Aware Agent Orchestration: Applying RCPSP to Agentic Workflows
A framework for managing agentic AI workflows through multi-dimensional budgets: tokens, time, money, human attention, and risk.
Announcing Keystone
Self-sovereign NixOS infrastructure with TPM security and declarative configuration
Announcing Catalyst
A development platform with preview environments for every pull request
Announcing Meze
A meal planning platform that optimizes for nutrition, wellbeing, budget, and culinary curiosity
Exploring Local GPT Models: A Comparison of GPT-4 and Mistral 7B on WasmEdge
Comparing GPT-4 and (local) Mistral 7B: An comparison of their performance using WasmEdge for local GPT model execution.
Tamagatchi Like Tutor
Building a single purpose embeeded device to teach basic arithmetic.
Lean Hackathon with GPTs
Working with multiple GPTs to quickly iterate on ideas.
Ingesting a folder of split CSVs from database table.
Using Pandas and xargs we import a table exported as multiple csvs in parallel to multiple tables before rejoining them using a union.
Declarative KVM with vagrant-libvirt
I often reach for KVM for work that doesn't really fit into containerized workloads. This is sually for planning out a physical server
Choosing the best multi-OS setup with PCIe device passthrough
In this post I discuss my experience with my Linux workstations that use a technology called PCIe passthrough to use a dedicated GPU for gaming in a Windows Guest.
Contemplating Dunning-Kruger.
I've been contemplating the Dunning-Kruger effect and it's caused a bit of anxiety.
Getting your Heart in Redzone
How to train for Vo2 max using the Apple Watch.
Project Quiescent
A new project i'm working on to build better blogs that live inside of git.
Summertime Adventure in New Orleans
Visiting New Orleans with my friend Andy
Mount Kilimanjaro Part 1 - Getting ready
Origin's of my Tanzania Africa trip to climb Kilimanjaro to raise funds for the Arizona Burn center.
Straight forward reusable React components
Building clean reusable components and avoiding decision paralysis when choosing their props.
Building a scheduled CI E2E test failure Slack notifier
How to build a Slack notifier when scheduled E2E tests fail.
Alpine k3s based single node Kubernetes cluster.
This guide shows how to set up a Kubernetes node with Alpine
Docker Linux Workstation Development
Making linux Docker more like Docker Desktop for macOS and Windows.
Building a Enum Based Form Stepper In React Typescript
We look at a streamlined form stepper design pattern.
Wireguard Based VPN Intranets
Understanding and Implementing Private Intranets
Apollo Cache Overview
What is the Apollo cache, ensure correct usage and update post mutation.
Typescript React Grid Areas
A Reusable Component Design Pattern for CSS Grid Areas in Typescript React.
Rsync'ing Code Directories Between two computers
A script to attempt keeping my code folder in sync between my laptop and workstation.
Scytale: Ansible Automated Private Key Infrastructure.
Automated private key infrastructure (PKI), Ansible managed certificate authority, server and client certificates.
Multi Arch Docker Buildx in CI/CD
Automated Multi Arch Docker Image Builds
Gondola
Ansible Playbook for Emulating Raspberry Pi OS with KVM
Writing a gear torque calculator
While utilizing a stepper motor and gears. I needed more torque and different sized gears. So I wrote a small gear torque calculator.
Compiling and Testing on a remote microcontroller
We learn how we can develop microcontroller code using the Arduino CLI, compile it and the upload our code to the micrcontroller.
Driving a stepper motor with a microcontroller
Controlling a stepper motor.
Evaluating Rust.
A look at setting using Rust for REST APIs and Embedded development.
Learning network security with IoT/HomeKit.
How setting up IoT/HomeKit can teach you about network security.
MacOS fast user switching.
Use fast user switching for hygienic separation between personal and professional accounts on a single laptop.
New site stack
We take a look at the process and technology behind this site.