BREAK. BUILD.
LEARN. REPEAT.
This is the workbench behind the technical side of The New Atlas: the place for experiments, software, self-hosted tools, authentication projects, monitoring, dashboards, troubleshooting, and the lessons that come from making systems actually work.
THE MESSY MIDDLE IS THE POINT.
Not every project starts with a polished plan or ends with a perfect answer. The Tech Lab is where I document the testing, configuration, mistakes, fixes, and small discoveries that sit between the idea and the finished system. It is intentionally more hands-on than the Technology overview and broader than the Home Lab infrastructure pages.
SELF-HOSTED TOOLS
Services I run, test, connect, and troubleshoot across the lab—from communication and documentation tools to monitoring, remote access, and internal utilities.
AUTHENTICATION & SSO
Experiments with centralized identity, OpenID Connect, SAML, multi-factor authentication, and the practical reality of getting different applications to cooperate.
MONITORING & DASHBOARDS
Ways to make systems easier to understand at a glance—health monitoring, status displays, alerts, dashboards, and the rack-mounted information screen concept.
WHEN THINGS BREAK
Configuration errors, reverse-proxy problems, 502s, redirects, failed integrations, and the step-by-step process of narrowing down what actually went wrong.
WHAT I’M WORKING THROUGH NOW
The lab is currently centered on strengthening the network, improving monitoring and alerting, expanding the self-hosted service stack, and making the environment easier to diagnose when something fails. This section will evolve as projects move from experiments into stable parts of the system.
