About Slightly Overengineered

Slightly Overengineered is where I document the projects where I use tech, AI, and a bit of stubbornness to make everyday life run smoother—usually by building something slightly more complex than it strictly needs to be.

I’m a home-lab / smart-home / “vibe coder” type who likes turning:

“This is annoying.”
into
“What if we built a system for it?”

This site is where those systems live.

What You’ll Find Here

Real-World Automation Experiments

Projects that actually run in my house, not just in a demo environment. For example:

  • A custom Meal Prep Engine that:
    • Plans my high-protein, high-fiber meals
    • Reuses Sunday-prepped proteins for teen dinners
    • Generates HTML pages I host on my home server and display on a kitchen tablet

These aren’t theoretical case studies; they’re tools my family uses every week.

AI as a Practical Tool

I use AI less as a toy and more as a co-designer and tutor:

  • Designing workflows and instruction sets
  • Helping me study for certifications
  • Helping my kids work through geometry concepts I had to re-learn myself

When I share prompts or instruction files, the goal is that you can adapt them for your own setup.

Home Lab and “Slightly Extra” Projects

Anything that fits the “slightly overengineered but actually helpful” vibe is fair game:

  • Home Assistant dashboards and automations
  • Unraid, Docker, and self-hosted tools
  • Occasional creative side projects when the same brain gets pointed at storytelling instead of wiring

If it mixes real life, tech, and tinkering, it belongs here.

Who This Is For

You’ll probably feel at home here if:

  • You like using tech to make everyday life less chaotic
  • You enjoy seeing how something was built, not just polished end results
  • You’re okay with solutions that are a bit “extra” but genuinely useful

You don’t need to be a full-time engineer. I break things, learn, and iterate in public.

Where to Start

Since the site is still new, good starting points are:

Coming soon: a write-up on how I’ve been using Grok both to prep for certifications and to coach my teens through geometry concepts I’d long forgotten.