A couple of months ago Matt Haughey wrote a post about “vibe coding” his home dashboard, and something clicked. Matt built himself a page — plexology, he calls it — that pulls in everything he wants to keep an eye on: solar production, camera feeds, Plex downloads, the whole home network at a glance. I read it and thought, I want that. Not that exact thing, but that shape. One page, one URL, my house at a glance.
So I built one. It’s called Homebase and it lives at bump:8080, served off the Synology in my work from home office.
The stack is small. The Synology hosts the page, and a little custom code proxy. My own, but written with some help, it handles all the API calls and credential management. That means the front end just asks my server “what should this widget say?” and the server does the actual fetching from ESPN, the weather service, Blizzard for the WoW data, Tailscale, my Hue smart lights, Scrypted for the Blink cameras, and everything else. One place to keep the tokens. One place to add caching. One place to bolt on the next widget when something new catches my attention.
Which has ended up happening a lot since I started this project in March. What started as “just the weather, my custom sports scores, Synology status and Tailscale” has crept into something a little more baroque.
There’s the Decatur forecast, a panel showing me if the WoW servers I play on are currently up, the item levels for my WoW characters at the level cap, every device on my Tailnet with its last check-in, today’s games for the teams I care about and what network each is on, the smart lights I actually pay attention to, Synology temp and CPU and storage, three Blink cameras piped in through Scrypted webhooks, my Goodreads challenge (51 of 100 as of this morning, on schedule, thank you), and a strip of the sites I open the most.
None of it is technically hard, exactly, but I probably would never have built any of it without a coding partner. I used Claude to build the whole thing, one widget at a time. “Add a panel for my WoW characters and hit the Blizzard API. It’s less that AI wrote the code, and more that AI turned the whole project into a conversation. I got to stay in the mode I actually enjoy*”this looks wrong, this panel is too crowded, I want the ilvl in a different color* and let the plumbing follow along behind. I was still managing the code, the deployment, github and how things worked, but I got it done a lot faster than I would have ever been able to before. Also, it’s responsive, and that alone would have probably taken me a week to get right.
Along the way, I learned how I like to work with an agentic partner on projects like this. I learned a ton about managing context. This project started in chat, moved to Claude Code, and it’s now portable across machines through a custom set of context management files that I have evolved over time.
The nicest surprise is that Homebase has become the tab I open first in the morning, before email. There is something clarifying about a page that only shows me things about my house. My weather, my books, my characters, my cameras, my box in the office running warm. Nothing about the algorithm. Nothing anyone else can push into it. I think it will evolve and expand even more over time.
Thanks to Matt for the nudge.
