windows

When a former colleague asked me to fix a decade-old backup script I wrote as an employee, I was reminded of the unrealistic expectations often placed on IT professionals regarding long-term maintenance. This experience highlights the importance of setting clear boundaries and understanding that true sustainability comes from proper system lifecycle management, not personal pride or unpaid warranty work.

I share my journey of upgrading a home office temperature monitoring system by replacing an unattractive Raspberry Pi LED display with a sleek Universal Windows Platform application. This post details how I leverage Microsoft Azure services, including IoT Hub and Functions, to collect sensor data and present it through a custom desktop interface that runs discreetly in the Windows System Tray.

If you are curious about how to leverage Windows 10 and Azure to automatically track your work-from-home status, this post details my experience building that custom solution. I share the technical challenges I faced in detecting lock/unlock states using C# and why I chose a cloud-based API over traditional scheduling tools to ensure reliable monitoring.

Join me as I document the upgrade of my five-year-old home workstation, sharing my criteria for selecting components optimized for virtualization and professional tasks rather than gaming. I explain why I chose to build a custom PC instead of buying a traditional server, focusing on balancing performance, noise levels, and cost for a setup that handles Plex, VMs, and daily development work.

In this follow-up to my initial planning phase, I explain how I refined my high-end workstation build to better suit my professional workflow and budget constraints by opting for an AMD Ryzen 9 setup. I detail the specific component choices that prioritized storage performance and development tasks over gaming, along with the straightforward assembly process of this new 1,639 € configuration.