Building small, sharp things at the edge of infrastructure and intelligence.
IVANLAB is a personal homelab and sandbox for applied engineering — where cloud-native infrastructure, embedded hardware and applied AI meet in one messy, well-documented workbench.
What this lab is about
A rotating set of interests, kept alive through side projects, homelab experiments and the occasional 2am debugging session.
AI & LLMs
Local inference, fine-tuning small models and building agentic automations that stay useful once the novelty wears off.
Kubernetes & Cloud Native
Bare-metal clusters, GitOps workflows and the never-ending pursuit of a homelab that survives its own experiments.
Networking
Routing, VLANs, service meshes and the quiet satisfaction of packets going exactly where they were told to.
Embedded Electronics
Microcontrollers, PCB prototypes and firmware that talks to the physical world — soldering iron included.
IoT & Home Automation
Sensors, actuators and automations wired into a real home — reliability first, novelty second.
Energy & Automation
Solar, batteries and load control — optimizing for kilowatt-hours the same way you'd optimize a hot code path.
From the workbench
A handful of ongoing experiments. Most are half-finished by design — that's how a lab is supposed to look.
Homelab Cluster
A small bare-metal Kubernetes cluster running the household's real infrastructure, from observability to home automation.
Autonomous Automation Agent
An LLM-assisted control layer that reasons about routines and energy use without ever making a real-time control decision itself.
Network Observability Stack
Flow-level visibility across the cluster and the edge, built to answer "what is actually talking to what" in seconds.
Sensor & Actuator Mesh
A growing collection of embedded sensors and small boards feeding real-time state back into the home automation layer.
Say hello
Open to conversations about infrastructure, automation, or anything with a soldering iron nearby.