What is on the bench and what already shipped, with the real numbers. The statuses are honest, IN PROGRESS means I am still in the middle of it.
The $0 a month publishing setup
SHIPPED
Two static sites and a redirect worker, deployed from git to Cloudflare's free tier. It replaced a $12 USD a month Ghost server that billed me for four years whether I wrote anything or not (about $790 CAD in total, a lot of it for guilt). Every old URL from the last 13 years still lands somewhere sensible.
how a post gets published · $0 a month
markdown file on my laptop
an essay, a guide, or a lab note
↓git push, open a pull request
GitHub (InformalEngineer org)
CI builds the site and posts a preview link, that is the proofread
↓merge to main, about 2 minutes
Cloudflare Pages, free tier
static files served from the edge
meshrahman.com
Next.js, the stories
informalengineer.com
Astro, the procedures
meshaelr.com
a Worker with 20 permanent redirects, so old links never die
My family uses things running in our basement every day (ad blocking, the media server, the home automations), and until this year all of it lived on one Lenovo box. One box means every update is a bet the whole house loses if I'm wrong. So I bought three used Lenovo M710q mini PCs and CA$120 of RAM, and I'm moving everything onto a cluster where any one machine is allowed to die.
homelab, cluster build (2026)
the internet
↓Cloudflare Tunnel, outbound only, zero open ports
Proxmox cluster, 68 GB RAM total
one Kubernetes (k3s) VM per node, config lives in Git and Flux applies it
node 1 · M710q
used Lenovo mini PC, 24 GB
node 2 · M710q
used Lenovo mini PC, 24 GB
node 3 · M710q
used Lenovo mini PC, 20 GB
built so any one node can die and the services keep running
QNAP NAS, 8 TB
bulk storage
M720s, the old single box
i5-8500, 16 GB, 4 TB ZFS pool, 5 guests, gets wiped and rejoins as node 4
My wife was pregnant, we needed a second car, I had $20,000 CAD to spend, and I came home with a 2011 Sequoia. I saw the red flags. I want to be clear that I saw them. It is slowly becoming the family camping rig, and the buying story is the first video.
paid
$14,500 CAD
in USD
~$10,500
odometer
195,000 km
budget left
$5,500 CAD
The budgeting system
RUNNING
The spreadsheet that has run our money since 2019, through a house, a truck, and a kid. The essay that is up now is the 2019 version. The rebuild, with my current categories and real numbers, is first in the rewrite queue.