The Digital Potting Shed

It’s obvious to say that the world shrank during the Covid lockdowns. For a Product Manager and recovering Engineer / Team Leader, it meant working from home and pottering around the house talking to plants far more than is probably healthy.

An aspect I didn’t expect was how much my technical inspiration had changed. In the before times, I would hunt the web, write loads on Twitter, post on blogs, make little scripts/sites and share them. Heck, I even used to chat on IRC groups. Covid somehow changed that. The world became a scarier place — harder to engage with, harder to read about, harder to interact with. Just… less nice, overall.

I’d also become slightly jaded with web technologies. There are probably a few reasons for this. After years of developing mobile apps, it’s easy to fall out of the loop with current web tech. I’m sure there are still wonderful places online, but I’d lost the joy of building simple websites. I found it baffling how many modern sites had become slower, harder to use, and oddly complex to get back into. Plus, I became more hesitant to run projects on the open web — especially with all the security concerns that come with it. These days, setting up a VM and installing WordPress just to play around with stuff, just isn't right.

So I became more obsessed with my small little world. The world on my LAN — where I could play with hacky things, learn, and tinker freely. A space to explore without worrying about Covid, or the outside world. My digital potting shed.

This might sound a little desperate. Or dull. Or maybe you’re picturing a bloke slowly retreating from society. Don’t despair though. I actually found the opposite to be true — and strangely, this little dive into my offline world inspired me more than I expected. So much, in fact, that it felt right to write some of it down. Which I guess... brings me here.

So what did this foray into my digital shed result in? A few things I’ll no doubt be posting about soon:

• The joys of 433MHz and what you can discover with Software Defined Radio.
• Building weather stations and making your own forecasts.
• Projects that answer the question: "What’s flying overhead?"
• Tiny little screens to solve tiny little problems.
• More Raspberry Pis than you can shake a stick at.
• The joys of Home Assistant, data hoarding, and why everyone needs a Grafana-powered temperature high-score dashboard.

So, in the coming “insert time frame”, I’ll probably post a bit more about all of that.

16/04/2025