pieterpel
Engineering notebook · est. 2026

Most software gets described. I'd rather show you it running.

A working record of building things properly — declarative infrastructure, game-playing AI, and the systems in between. Every post you can read as a story; every claim you can open up and inspect down to the config.

Series

A sequence, in order
Nixberry Turning a Raspberry Pi into a declaratively-managed retro console, backed by a Hetzner box and stitched together over Tailscale.
  1. 1 The whole picture: a Pi, a Hetzner box, and a tailnet A retro machine shouldn't be a pile of hand-edited configs you're afraid to touch. Here's the system I built so mine rebuilds itself. 2026·07 · 4 min
  2. 2 It has to feel like a console Installing RetroArch gets you a computer with an emulator on it. The console is everything between the power coming on and the first game starting. 2026·07 · 8 min
  3. 3 The library lives elsewhere The VM owns the ROMs, the metadata and the box art. The console mirrors that library onto its own disk, so a rebuild restores everything and a game never waits on the network to load. 2026·07 · 6 min
  4. 4 Saves follow you Saves and savestates are written to a store on the VM, over the tailnet and conflict-aware. The console holds nothing you would lose, and nothing goes to a third party. 2026·07 · 6 min
  5. 5 Run the toy like prod A headless console fails silently. Its logs and metrics ship to the same Grafana as the server, so a dead service becomes a Telegram message instead of a mystery. 2026·07 · 7 min
Dotfiles on Nix How I manage my dotfiles: one framework instead of a folder of files, one flake for every machine I own, and a deliberate choice about which parts the internet gets to see.
  1. 1 From .bashrc to Nix The same job done twice: aliases and shell config as loose files, and then the same thing in my repo. For people who keep dotfiles in git and have never touched Nix. 2026·09 · 5 min
  2. 2 One flake for every machine My dotfiles repo builds a Raspberry Pi, a Linux laptop, two Macs and a VM, and the machines are not special cases. What the flake looks like, why no file imports another, and what that costs. 2026·10 · 5 min
  3. 3 Every file the same shape What is actually inside one module: the two parts every file has, why the option is the interface, and how a machine ends up being a list of switches. 2026·10 · 4 min
  4. 4 What I publish and what I don't The dotfiles repo is public and the services repo is not. Where that line is, the three reasons something ends up private, and what pushed pieces across it. 2026·10 · 5 min