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 20-node fleet, one operator
See the work Get in touch
20nodes
Fleet under management
k3scluster
Owned hardware, no cloud bill
1operator
Solo IT leadership
24/7uptime
Self-hosted, observed, on-call
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.

Two dozen 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.

github.com/tinybluedev
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
More from tinyblue

The rest of the site.

Real pages, not anchor scroll — each one a stop in the operating portfolio.

Projects Case studies · 8 systems About Operator · bio · media kit Timeline Day job → fleet → products Uses Hardware · software · stack Nix The persistent agent Dashboard Mission control launcher Changelog What shipped recently Privacy Self-hosted by default
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.

contact@tinyblue.dev github.com/tinybluedev