Nicholas Clooney

Latest Posts

An Ingress Engine That’s Everywhere-Accessible but Publicly Invisible

Most personal projects and homelab services don’t need to be public, but they do need to be reachable. I want to access my dev tools, internal dashboards, and side projects from anywhere, on any of my own devices, without opening ports, exposing IPs, or worrying about who might stumble across them on the internet.

This post walks through how I built an everywhere-accessible but publicly invisible ingress engine using Tailscale, Docker, Caddy, and DNS rewrites. The result is a private, domain-based setup that behaves like a small cloud. It has HTTPS, clean hostnames, and reverse proxying, but is only accessible to me, lives on my own machine, and never touches the public internet.

Private Analytics With Umami, Docker Compose, and Ansible

I wanted first-party analytics on my blog without handing traffic data to a SaaS vendor. Umami checked every box: open source, self-hostable, and friendly to privacy. I already keep a small VPS online 24/7, so dedicating a slice of that machine to Umami felt like a perfect fit.

Analytics turned into a blind spot once I shut off the usual trackers. I needed something:

Behind the Scenes: Pair-Writing the Umami Post With GPT

I’ve had the Umami + Ansible post in my head for ages, but it touched three different repositories and a whole bunch of code snippets. Totally doable, but undeniably tedious — which is why it kept slipping down the backlog. You can read the finished article here: Private Analytics With Umami, Docker Compose, and Ansible.

The idea that finally nudged it forward was simple: why not let GPT (Codex) do the heavy lifting while I steer?

My Super Powered Tmux - One Session But Multiple 'Focuses'

I want tmux to feel like one cohesive environment that never goes away. When I am docked at my desk, I spread iTerm across multiple Mission Control desktops and keep a different project on each space, with some other tools I need for that specific project. Later, when I grab my MacBook Air or open Blink on my iPhone or iPad, I want those exact same panes, command histories, and scrollback.

Plain tmux attach gets close, but the shared "current window" breaks the illusion. When I switch to another window in my main terminal, all other tmux clients jump to the same window and interrupts whatever flow I was in. I wanted tmux to be stateful and multi-focus.

"Can you believe this?" — The Tailscale Setup That Gave Me Absolute Freedom

If you’ve ever wanted your phone to double as a full-fledged development studio (complete with SSH, live previews, and your entire workflow at your fingertips) then this story is for you. It’s about how a small experiment with Tailscale turned into a complete rewire of how I build, code, and stay connected. From private dev environments to bathtub coding sessions (yes, really), here’s how it all came together.

Every section in this story layers on the next, building toward the “I can’t believe my phone is a full dev studio” moment at the end—so if you can, read it through. The payoff is worth it.

Setting Up Rust Securely (Without the Blind `curl | sh`)

Rust is one of the most thoughtfully designed languages of our time — but setting it up on macOS can feel oddly opaque. The standard advice is to run a one-liner like curl https://sh.rustup.rs | sh, which works beautifully but hides a lot of what’s happening behind the scenes. For developers who are more security-conscious or just prefer to know what’s being installed and where, this default approach can feel like a black box.

This post explores the different ways to install and manage Rust on macOS — from the convenience of Homebrew to the flexibility of rustup, and the transparency of manual or containerized setups. The goal is simple: give you control and understanding without sacrificing practicality.

Lighting Up GitHub Embeds in My Eleventy Blog

For the longest time, sharing code from GitHub meant screenshotting or pasting raw snippets into Markdown. Both options felt brittle—screenshots hide the text from RSS readers, while copy-pastes drift out of sync the minute the upstream file changes. I wanted the readability of Emgithub, the SEO of server-side rendering, and zero third-party JavaScript.

That mix finally landed this week: a {% github %} shortcode that fetches code at build time, highlights it, numbers each line, and offers a copy button. All it needs is the GitHub blob URL and an optional style flag for light or dark chrome.

How I Accidentally Exposed My Umami Dashboard (and What I Learned)

Recently, a few hours after setting up Umami with Docker and Nginx on my VPS, I stumbled into a misconfiguration that left the admin dashboard exposed to the public web. Thankfully, there was no immediate danger. Since right after creating Umami's docker instance, I have updated the admin username and password immediately, and locked it down before anything bad could happen. Still, it was a stressful reminder that small mistakes in deployment can have big consequences.

Here’s the story of what happened and what I learned along the way.

Running Docker on macOS Without Docker Desktop: My Journey With Colima

Like a lot of developers coming from Linux or a server environment, I hit some confusion when setting up Docker on my Mac. On Linux, you just install Docker and it works natively. On macOS, it’s a bit different — there’s no native Docker Engine because we don’t have a Linux kernel. That’s where tools like Docker Desktop and Colima come in.

Let me walk through what I’ve learned.

Wrestling Safari and Cloudflare: Debugging Umami Analytics

I spent the better half of today getting Umami analytics to cooperate with a static blog served through Cloudflare and an Nginx proxy. The tracking script was having issue in Safari (CORS) and Firefox (nothing showed up in the Developer Tools' Network tab).

This is the story of following the trail from mysterious redirects to CORS ghosts and finally to Firefox’s stealthy sendBeacon API.

Debugging Tailscale on UK Mobile Networks: A Journey into NAT, DERP, and IPv6

What started as a simple question — "Why can’t I reach my MacBook over Tailscale from my iPhone on mobile data?" — turned into a deep dive into NAT types, relay servers, and the hidden power of IPv6. This post documents the technical journey, the dead ends, and the final conclusion.

So the mystery: why do VPS connections work, but Mac connections fail?

AI-Assisted Coding on iPhone: A Journey of Tools, Freedom, and Joy

For years, I thought of coding as something tied to my desk — Mac in front of me, full keyboard, full IDE. But recently, I found myself dreaming: what if I could carry my entire creative coding studio in my pocket? Not just SSH access, but a true AI-assisted environment where I could code, commit, and preview my projects anywhere.

This blog is half technical walkthrough, half personal reflection. It’s the story of how I explored Cloudflare Tunnel, discovered Tailscale, refined my workflow with tmux and iTerm, and ultimately unlocked the freedom of having a fully fledged Mac in my pocket.

Shipping Social Cards with Satori (and GPT-5 Codex)

I’ve always loved how iMessage or WhatsApp automatically turn a shared link into a little postcard. Until this week, that magic felt like a black box. I suspected there had to be an open standard behind it, but I’d never hooked it up myself. Cue a pairing session with GPT-5 Codex, and about two hours later, the 11ty Subspace Builder can mint its own branded previews for every post.

Here is an example card for this blog post.

11ty Subspace Builder v1.0.0

Our first stable launch brings a polished Eleventy 3 starter with theme switching, accessible navigation, OG image automation, and a streamlined authoring flow.

The Joy (and Frustrations) of Building Small Sites with GPT-5 Codex

Building small websites with GPT-5 Codex turned out to be less about typing code and more about collaboration. From crude sketches to polished sites, the model took on the heavy lifting while I guided direction and design.

Along the way I discovered both the joy of fast iteration and the limits of relying on an AI partner. These projects became less about the sites themselves and more about exploring a new style of programming — conversational, creative, and sometimes flawed, but always eye-opening.

Building My Own Subspace Builder

Last month, my girlfriend mentioned she needed a sleek portfolio site, and I realized I’d been meaning to start a personal tech blog.

I wanted something lightweight—easy to spin up and even easier to tweak. So I dove in: building a small 11ty + Tachyons site from scratch, pushing every iteration live in under a minute, and watching her face light up with each update even though she’s halfway across the country.