Claude

You know that feeling when you solve a complex problem and everything just works? That’s exactly how I felt completing my latest knitting marathon. As someone who spends her days wrangling cloud infrastructure, I’ve discovered that knitting scratches the same problem-solving itch in surprisingly similar ways. Over the past few years, I’ve been treating knitting patterns like code repositories - each project a new challenge to debug, optimize, and deploy. And just like my home lab projects, some turn out better than others. Let me walk you through my recent “releases” and what I learned along the way. ...

When I set up my home lab with a Synology DS420j NAS, I wanted a project that would let me explore Claude’s API capabilities in a practical, everyday context. The result is a Python pipeline that takes photos from my NAS, hands them to Claude, and automatically generates and publishes a fully formatted blog post to my Hugo static site on GitHub. Here’s how I built it. The Hardware The foundation of this project is straightforward: a Synology DS420j — a 4-bay NAS — connected to a home router via a network switch. The NAS serves as the central storage layer, holding photos in a dedicated shared folder (blog/photos/latest/) that the pipeline reads from. The DS420j runs Synology’s DSM operating system and is accessible at a reserved local IP address, which makes it a reliable and addressable part of the home network. ...

I’ve recently started using Claude — specifically the Claude Code CLI — and it’s already changed how I manage this blog. Instead of manually writing posts and running git commands, I can now just describe what I want and Claude handles the rest: writing the post, building the site, committing, and pushing to GitHub. It’s pretty wild. To get started I picked up a Claude Pro subscription, which is required to use Claude Code — the free tier doesn’t include it. Totally worth it. Here’s how to get it set up on a MacBook Air. ...