Welcome to fabgt.net!

Engineering notes from the homelab and beyond — self-hosted on a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster.

Hi, I’m Fab 👋

I’m an engineer who loves to learn — from people, books, courses, and above all from hands-on projects. I thrive in competitive environments, push boundaries relentlessly, and enjoy creating and sharing a vision of the future that has a real, positive impact on the business.

This website is my public engineering notebook. It gathers the things I find worth documenting while working on home projects and “real” (professional) development — so future me (and hopefully you) can benefit from them.

What I do

I’ve spent my career building the software, tools, and platforms that help engineers develop reliable embedded systems at scale.

Embedded beginnings. I started as an Embedded Software Engineer, developing applications for heavy-duty truck air suspension systems, before moving on to Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) frameworks and real-time environments for electric propulsion and energy systems in passenger vehicles. Working close to both hardware and software gave me a solid understanding of embedded systems, testing, automation, and the complexity of modern automotive development.

From components to teams. Over time, my focus shifted from building individual components to enabling entire engineering teams. I led a team of 12 engineers responsible for integrating hardware and software into new software baselines on test vehicles and complete HIL systems — making sure new features could be validated efficiently and reliably.

Platform engineering at scale. Today, I lead several DevOps and platform engineering teams developing the infrastructure, tooling, and CI/CD capabilities used by hundreds of engineers. My work centres on developer experience, build and test automation, software integration, and engineering efficiency across the organization. I enjoy solving large-scale technical challenges, simplifying complex workflows, and helping teams deliver high-quality software faster — without compromising reliability.

Whether I’m designing technical strategies, improving development platforms, or mentoring engineers and leaders, I still approach problems with the same engineering mindset that got me started:

Understand the system. Automate what can be automated. Continuously improve it.

About this site

Everything you’re reading is served from a Raspberry Pi sitting at home. Building and running it is one of the projects. Highlights so far:

• A production-grade local web server with Flask and Waitress, securely exposed to the internet with Cloudflare tunnels.

• Automated HTML builds of this documentation with Sphinx and Jenkins.

• A monitoring dashboard for server resources with Grafana.

• A self-hosted AI chatbot with Ollama and Open WebUI.

• (Ongoing) Running this site as a containerised app on a Kubernetes cluster of Raspberry Pis — learning Docker and k8s properties and advantages along the way.

You’ll also find notes on Python, Linux/Ubuntu, and Bash — with more to come on machine learning, data science, and whatever grabs my curiosity next.

Off the clock

I like cycling, running, and board games. The newest addition to the list: building and flying FPV quadcopter drones.

But if I’m honest, my main hobby is simply learning new things.

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Content

🌐 Web server & documentation

• Running a Flask App in Production
  • Basic Flask Server to serve static html files
    • Creating a basic Flask Application
    • Serving Static files
  • Run a production server
  • Create a service with systemd to run the server at startup
  • Common pitfalls
    • Python OSError: [Errno 98] Address already in use
• Creating a Cloudflare tunnel to expose a locally hosted server
  • Prerequisites
  • Setup on Raspberry Pi
    • Installation
    • Authentication
• Automated builds with Jenkins
  • Prerequisites
    • 1. Install Jenkins on a RaspberryPi
    • 1. Create a shell script to start the agent (optional if using master with an executor)
    • 3. Create credentials to be used for checkout of Git repositories
  • Create a new Job
  • Webhooks for github
  • Common pitfalls
    • Invalid X-Instance-Identity
    • Provided port:xxxxx is not reachable on host 192.168.xxx.xxx
• Monitoring Dashboard of Server resources
  • Prerequisites
    • 1. Install Node_Exporter on RaspberryPi
    • 2. Install Prometheus on RaspberryPi
    • 3. Install Grafana on RaspberryPi
• AI Chatbot with Ollama and WebUI
  • Prerequisites
    • 1. Install Docker
    • 2. Install Ollama and Open Web UI
    • 3. Configure Ollama and Web UI
• Remote SSH with Cloudflare
  • Prerequisites
    • 1. Create a new Public Hostname with the SSH protocol
    • 2 . Configure the host to accept ssh request through Cloudflare
    • 3 . Connect to the host from itself and add the public key
    • 4 . Use the PUTTY client to connect to the host from anywhere
• Running a Kubernetes cluster on Raspberry Pis
  • 1. Edit the code
  • 2. Build a new image
  • 3. Tag and push to the registry
  • 4. Deploy the new version
  • 5. Verify
  • If something’s wrong: roll back
  • Quick reference (the whole loop)
  • What each piece is doing (the mental model)

🐧 Ubuntu tips & setup

• General tips
  • Change python version
  • File Permissions
    • Basics
    • Permissions Syntax
    • Setting and modifying Permissions
  • Ports
    • List usb interface ports
• Setting up the printer
  • Download the driver
  • Install old Dependencies
  • Install Canon Packages
• Network tricks
  • Find hosts connected to a network
• Serial
  • Finding serial devices
  • Change permission on usb devices
  • Getting started with minicom
• Installing Matlab
  • Installing Matlab
    • Prerequisites
    • Install MatLab
    • Create shortcut launcher and icon

🐍 Python

• Importing modules
  • Basic Python import
  • Packages
  • Absolute and Relative imports
  • Python’s Import path
  • Create and Install a Local Package
• GUI in Python with Tkinter
  • Installing Tkinter
  • Hello World!
  • Positioning with the Grid System
  • Widgets
    • Bind Multiple Commands to Tkinter Button
• PEP8
  • Naming Conventions
• OS Module
  • os.path

💻 Bash

• Getting Started with Bash Scripting
  • Prerequisites
  • Hello World!
  • Variables
    • Empty Variable
  • Concatenate strings
  • Conditions
  • Find files
  • Add to PATH
  • CURL
  • ZIP

Indices and tables

• Search Page