// chris johnsonField notes on cybersecurity, AI-assisted development, infrastructure, and the craft of shipping things that actually work.
Get a weekly email with what I learned, summaries of new posts, and direct links. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Part 6 of the home network dashboard build. The LOG LAKE panel ships a SIEM ingestion-health strip and a GUI firewall query builder that compiles to parameterized ClickHouse under the hood. One PR, two waves, 1193 backend tests at merge. Then deploy day on the live Mac mini produced five production-only bugs in a single afternoon: a readonly-pool 500, a timezone-mixed poll crash that had been firing every five minutes for hours, a 20-day-silent Pi-hole pipeline (two layers stacked), a Vector container reading a stale bind-mounted config, and a UDM doubled-hostname frame that silently broke action derivation for 159,909 rows. The meta-lesson is that the proposed fix for the last one was an invasive Vector source rewrite that the persona team vetoed in favor of an operator toggle and a four-line MV recreation.
A red dns_bypass card on my home dashboard sat at 0.667. Closing it took two ZBF rules, a deliberately incomplete remediation on the Default subnet, and a new traffic_rules surface in the chris2ao/unifi-mcp v0.4.0 release. Here is the full walk.
Part 5 of the home network dashboard build. Phase 1.1 ships the Network tab, five new surfaces, two new security signals, and 694 backend tests at merge. A 5-wave persona team caught a critical ship-blocker before merge, then in-session live verification on the deployed dashboard caught two more bugs of the exact same shape: wrong join field, silent zero, fixtures encoded the same wrong assumption. The marquee lesson is that persona-team review is necessary but not sufficient. The second line of defense is running the live system in-session, not waiting for a scheduled probe to find drift.
Part 1 of a multi-phase build: a single pane of glass for my UDM Pro, Pi-hole, and UniFi Protect home lab, written entirely with Claude Code. 12 parallel workstreams, four enrichment waves on top, 497 backend tests at 82.9 percent coverage, 132 frontend tests. One CRITICAL plus three HIGH security findings caught and fixed in review. The whole thing rests on the UniFi MCP, Pi-hole MCP, and persona-team patterns shipped in earlier posts; Phase 2 layers a cyberpunk skin on top of it.
4 agents, 6 phases, 19 markdown files, 2 diagrams, 20 NotebookLM sources, 1 false positive caught, 1 silent UniFi bug surfaced and shipped as v0.3.0 in the same session.
Two open-source UniFi MCP servers existed. Neither did what I wanted. So I built a third that combines their strengths, lazy-loads per product, and ships as a Claude Code plugin you can install with two slash commands.