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Biron Family / Behind the Build
Behind the Build / Overview

Alex Biron / Technical Team Lead

Useful software. Systems I operate.

I’m a Technical Team Lead. Outside work, I build applications, automate everyday workflows, and run the infrastructure behind them. This is a look inside those projects.

Last reviewed

On this page

This started with a practical question: could the software we use at home work better for the people actually using it? That became custom applications, room-specific interfaces, a self-hosted service platform, and a lot of carefully documented lessons.

Linux & ProxmoxPython & TypeScriptLocal AIDeployment & recovery
Hearth Home dashboard with room lighting presets, individual lamp sliders, and household shortcuts
Hearth, my custom Home Assistant interface. Actual frontend rendered with staged household data. Select the image to explore it at full size.

A few places to start

Interface + integrationA home that makes sense →Hearth turns Home Assistant into purpose-built household controls, dashboards, and device panels. Application engineeringPeople stay in charge →Workbench brings projects, decisions, materials, and reviewable agent contributions into one system. Product + operationsFrom dinner to deployment →A conversational meal-planning application with household boundaries and a deliberate release process. Systems debuggingAI that shares the machine →A resource-aware inference gateway, dedicated GPU services, and lessons in unified-memory contention.

The work beneath the interface

I run a four-node Proxmox cluster, Docker applications, public and private reverse proxies, monitoring, and layered backups. The interesting part is how those pieces behave when something goes wrong.

  • Architecture: how applications, household services, and AI compute fit together.
  • When free space lies: a backup repository looked healthy while the storage pool beneath it approached exhaustion.
  • Pour one out for the homies: the main server died at 4:17 a.m.; a shelved spare, a salvaged laptop and a five-dollar dummy plug had it back by 10:57 p.m.
  • Shipping safely: separating an application release from the shared edge that other services depend on.
  • Backups & recovery: what a successful backup proves—and what it doesn’t.

Built for use, explained honestly

These projects serve a household rather than a fictional enterprise. Budgets, reused hardware, maintenance time, and people’s patience are real constraints. I care about clear interfaces, observable failures, and systems another person can understand.

The project pages distinguish my work from upstream foundations and deployed features from ongoing development. Screenshots use staged data; operating examples describe documented incidents rather than live status.

Looking for someone who can connect application behavior to the systems underneath? Get in touch.