Author: Austin G
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Building a Personal Slack Alert System for Your Home Media Server
Running a home media server is great — until something goes sideways and you have no idea. A disk throws a warning at 2am, someone’s sharing their Plex password with half their office, or a download fails silently and nobody gets their movie. You find out days later, if at all. The fix? Wire everything…
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Connecting Radarr and Sonarr to Seerr (Formerly Overseerr)
If you’ve been down the self-hosted media server rabbit hole long enough, you’ve probably got a few moving parts running — a download client here, an indexer manager there, maybe Plex or Jellyfin at the front. At some point you want a single, clean interface where you (or your family) can just say “I want…
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Home Lab Contributions: Flash Safety, Docs, and a Dashboard That Wouldn’t Load in Safari
Home lab tools cover a pretty wide range. On one end you’ve got low-level firmware flashers talking directly to Samsung eMMC partitions over USB; on the other end you’ve got web dashboards showing DNS query stats in a browser. This batch of contributions touches both ends — and a few things in between: documentation that…
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Across the Stack: Contributing to Gutenberg, Jetpack, and the WordPress Ecosystem
WordPress powers a huge chunk of the internet, and its ecosystem stretches well beyond core — Gutenberg, Jetpack, developer tooling, boilerplates that new plugin authors use to scaffold their first project. Contributing across that ecosystem means touching a lot of different codebases with very different scopes: a block editor transform bug here, an invalid HTML…
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Fewer API Calls, Faster Syncs: Performance Fixes in Kometa and PlexTraktSync
If you’re running a self-hosted media server, you know the setup: Kometa keeps your Plex libraries organized with collections and overlays, and PlexTraktSync keeps your watch history synced between Plex and Trakt. Both tools spend a lot of time talking to external APIs — TMDb, Plex, Trakt — and on large libraries, every unnecessary call…
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Going Back to My Roots: Contributing to WordPress Plugins
Before I was into home labs and media servers, I was a WordPress developer. This week I went back to my roots and opened four PRs across two WordPress plugins — and honestly, it felt great. 🐘 WordPress, Still Kicking WordPress powers something like 43% of the web. The plugin ecosystem is massive, mostly open…
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Smoothing the Rough Edges
Not every valuable contribution involves fixing broken code. Some of the most useful changes are the ones that quietly improve everyday experience — removing copy that aged out years ago, surfacing the right explanation at the right moment, or making sure a log file doesn’t silently expose things it shouldn’t. Here are four contributions that…
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Fixing What Was Quietly Wrong
There’s a certain satisfaction in finding a bug that’s been hiding in plain sight. No crash, no obvious error message — just something subtly wrong that finally gets tracked down and fixed. Here are five open-source contributions from the past several days, all squarely in the “this was broken and now it isn’t” category. Kometa:…
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Fixing the Things You Actually See: Homarr & PlexTraktSync
Not every open source fix is deep in the engine. Sometimes it’s the dashboard that’s slightly wrong or the sync that quietly stops working after item 100. This week I fixed a few of those. 🖥️ The Front End of the Home Lab My home lab’s “front end” is the stuff I actually look at…