The Home Command Center
I run a small server stack at home: Docker Desktop on a Windows box, handling media management (Immich), Plex, container orchestration (Portainer), and a dashboard I built from scratch to keep tabs on things that matter to me: my swing trading system, my retirement progress, and my home network.
That last piece is what I call my Home Command Center. One dashboard, several jobs:
- Network visibility. A live traffic view, connected devices, bandwidth monitoring, and Pi-hole integration for content filtering across the house. When I added a new Raspberry Pi to take over DHCP and DNS filtering, Claude helped me work through a string of real bugs: session handling that would silently exhaust itself, a SQLite locking issue, MAC address formatting mismatches between systems that don't agree on dashes versus colons. Small things individually, but the kind of small things that turn a weekend project into a multi-day slog if you're debugging them alone at 11pm.
- Financial tracking. A retirement tab that tracks dividend income against a monthly goal, a net worth tracker pulling from home equity and cash balances, and countdown trackers for portfolio milestones. Nothing fancy, just the numbers I actually care about, in one place, instead of five different apps.
- A trading system. A momentum and mean-reversion strategy running against paper trading through Alpaca, with its own backtesting and logging. I didn't know how to build a trading system before I started. I do now, not because Claude wrote it for me and I walked away, but because I was in the code with it, asking why a signal fired when it shouldn't have, or how to size a position responsibly.
None of this is dazzling on its own. What's notable is the pace. Bugs that would've taken me a full evening of forum-searching got resolved in the time it took to describe the symptom clearly. That's the actual value:
“Not ‘AI writes your code,’ but ‘AI removes the friction between having a problem and understanding it.’”
Building notjustav.io
The site you're reading this on right now was built almost entirely through conversation with Claude: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, hand-coded but AI-assisted, no page builder, no template marketplace purchase.
I came in with a point of view: dark navy and slate, a gold accent, typography that felt more editorial than “corporate AV vendor,” Bebas Neue for headers, Instrument Serif for personality, DM Sans for body copy doing the actual work. I described the feel I wanted. Claude turned that into working code, and we iterated from there, adjusting spacing, fixing responsive breakpoints, building out a device directory with editorial notes instead of a flat spec sheet.
The part that mattered most to me wasn't the code. It was the strategy underneath it. This site exists to reposition how people think about what I do. Fifteen-plus years in AV and enterprise collaboration technology is easy to flatten into “the guy who fixes the projector.” It's not that. It's UCaaS architecture, it's Webex Calling migrations across a thousand-plus users, it's sitting in procurement meetings catching inconsistencies vendors hope nobody reads closely. That positioning is the part I own: what to say, what not to say, and how to structure a roadmap that goes from this site to actual revenue, one deliberate step at a time.
The Pattern, If There Is One
Both projects share the same shape. I didn't hand something off and wait for a finished product. I worked through problems in real time — a stuck bug, a design decision, a strategic question about how to position fifteen years of experience — with something that could hold the technical detail and the bigger picture at once.
“That's the difference between AI as a novelty and AI as a tool you actually build with. The Home Command Center runs every day in my house. This website is live right now. Neither one is a demo.”
More on how these get built, and what's next, coming soon.