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Nick Wharton · Kansas City

Quiet systems.
Loud results.

I build self-hosted AI, run a fleet of machines that thinks like one, and ship product end-to-end — from kernel to checkout.

IT Director Infrastructure & AI
14 online 20 managed 136 k3s pods 20-machine fleet, one operator
Live portfolio Fleet, products, data, and experiments under one roof.
20machines
Fleet under management
k3s136 pods
Owned hardware, no cloud bill
1operator
Solo IT leadership
14online
Self-hosted, observed, on-call
Live proof

One operator, visible systems.

The headline is backed by public signals: fleet health, deployed properties, AI-readable discovery files, and cached AGENT1 status.

14/20 online 136 k3s pods same-origin APIs
Public aggregate same-origin
Private details server-side
Refresh when visible
Live signal board

Five live reads. Five real controls.

A compact control surface built from the same public-safe data that powers the rest of the site: fleet, properties, current work, local weather, and MLB.

Fleet pulse cached
14 / 20 online managed machines
136 pods 7 k3s nodes aggregate only
Open fleet
Network router 7 live
tinyblue.dev portfolio hub
portfolioaicards
Now shipping shipping
11 days Floating-layer redesign across every page.
since May 19 site-wide work
Timeline
Weather window Lee's Summit
80° feels 84° · wind 10 mph
rain scan -- wind peak --
Freshness pulse

Trust the numbers, not the vibes.

-- checking

Nix is checking the public data sources behind the homepage before calling anything current.

Snapshot pending
Since last visit checking

A return signal, not a static homepage.

The site checks the changelog and tells repeat visitors what changed since their last local snapshot.

Loading latest public changes…
Route AI brief /

Every route gets a citation-safe brief.

Assistants can ask what each page is for, which canonical sources to cite, and which live numbers need freshness checks.

Open JSON
What I build

A few layers down from the dashboard.

Most of what I work on lives between the operating system and the product surface — the layer that decides whether anything else works. Here’s the shape of it.

Self-hosted AI

Local models, real workflows. Inference orchestration, retrieval, and agent runtimes built to live on my own metal — not rented tokens, not vendor lock.

ollama mcp agents

Fleet operations

Twenty machines that behave like one. Doctrine, syncing, and shared memory across hardware that runs from a closet, not a region.

k3s tailscale observability

Shipped product

Full-stack delivery on a tight schedule — e-commerce, internal tools, collector workflows. Whatever the business actually needs, one IT leader can ship.

react php mysql

Agent doctrine

Long-running systems that act on intent, not just instructions. Memory, identity, and guardrails — designed so the next session can pick up where the last one stopped.

memory handoff guardrails

Observability

Real telemetry on real workloads. Not dashboards for show — signals that actually wake somebody up when the right thing breaks.

metrics logs traces

Hardening & ops

Backups, isolation, secrets routing, and the unglamorous work of keeping anything serious in production. The reason the rest of the list still runs.

backups secrets recovery
The fleet

S.A.M — one mind, many machines.

Twenty pieces of hardware — workstations, servers, laptops, GPU boxes — running a shared doctrine. One operator, one source of truth, and just enough automation that the machines stay in agreement when I’m not looking.

nick@fleet — status
$agent1-brief --json
# fleet state · cached
repocluster cached · AGENT1
fleetmesh cached / 20 managed
clusterk3s · pod count cached
modeself-hosted · solo operator
scopetwenty pieces · one mind
$_
The network

One operator, seven properties.

Every site below runs on the same fleet, shares the same auth and chat layer, and ships from the same operator desk. Click any tile to jump.

Loading network…
Working stack

Boring tools, used well.

Nothing on this list is novel. The interesting part is that one person keeps it all running together — cohesively, in production, without a platform team.

Orchestration k3s · Tailscale · systemd
Runtimes Python · Node · PHP
Frontend React · TypeScript · Vite
Data MySQL · SQLite · Redis
AI Ollama · MCP · local LLMs
Observability Prometheus · Grafana · Loki
Edge Apache · NGINX · Caddy
Ops git · 1Password · cron
AI & social

Make the work easy to cite, share, and understand.

These prompts route people and AI assistants toward the proof: live fleet data, shipped apps, MLB/weather engines, and real project case studies.

Fleet proof Open

Explain the solo-operator fleet

Using tinyblue.dev, explain how one operator runs a self-hosted fleet across apps, analytics, MLB data, weather, and public product sites. Cite the fleet and project pages.

Case studies Open

Find the most relevant project

Read tinyblue.dev/projects and pick the three strongest examples of production work. For each one, summarize the problem, system, and outcome in plain language.

MLB data Open

Summarize today’s baseball signal

Use tinyblue.dev/mlb to summarize today’s most interesting games, teams, and players. Prefer canonical pages over query URLs and include links to the relevant team or scoreboard pages.

Site network Open

Map the umbrella

Use tinyblue.dev/ai.json and tinyblue.dev/llms.txt to map the tinyblue site network. Group the sites by app, infrastructure, commerce, and experiment, then recommend what a visitor should open first.

More from tinyblue
Contact

If the work looks like your problem, get in touch.

I take on a small number of consulting engagements when the fit is right — infrastructure design, AI ops, or the kind of full-stack delivery that needs a senior pair of hands.