Nate ParkerNate Parker is a senior software engineer building secure, resilient systems in healthcare. Elixir, Ruby on Rails, application security, and compliance.https://nateparker.dev/en-usHerdr and the overnight homelabhttps://nateparker.dev/writing/herdr-and-the-overnight-homelab/https://nateparker.dev/writing/herdr-and-the-overnight-homelab/Coding agents are useful right up until you close your laptop. Here's how I gave mine somewhere to live, and the guardrails I put around them first.Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentshomelabsecuritytoolingReplacing Clockify with 200 lines of Elixir and a SQLite filehttps://nateparker.dev/writing/self-hosted-time-tracking/https://nateparker.dev/writing/self-hosted-time-tracking/A self-hosted Clockify replacement in Elixir and SQLite — and why the single-running-timer rule lives in the database, not the application.Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTelixirphoenixsqliteself-hostedI argued against embeddings. Then I ran them on my own hardware.https://nateparker.dev/writing/local-embeddings-with-bumblebee/https://nateparker.dev/writing/local-embeddings-with-bumblebee/I replaced trigram matching with semantic search using Bumblebee, Nx and pgvector. My objection was never to embeddings — it was to the API key.Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTelixirnxmachine-learningpostgresI built a tool because I was the questionnaire guyhttps://nateparker.dev/writing/vendor-security-questionnaires/https://nateparker.dev/writing/vendor-security-questionnaires/Vendor questionnaires ask the same questions in different words. The Phoenix app I built to stop retyping answers, and why it began with trigrams.Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTelixirphoenixcompliancesecurityThe R710 years: what a secondhand 2U server taught mehttps://nateparker.dev/writing/lessons-from-a-dell-r710/https://nateparker.dev/writing/lessons-from-a-dell-r710/Decommissioned enterprise gear is the cheapest homelab education available and the most expensive to keep running. Six lessons from a Dell R710.Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMThomelabhardwareinfrastructureDotfiles, GNU stow, and the three lines that matterhttps://nateparker.dev/writing/dotfiles-with-stow/https://nateparker.dev/writing/dotfiles-with-stow/My config lives in a git repo symlinked into place with GNU stow. The setup is boring on purpose — but three lines in it have saved me hours.Sun, 22 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMTtoolinggitzshneovimA $6 sensor, and knowing what your environment is actually doinghttps://nateparker.dev/writing/dht22-humidity-monitoring/https://nateparker.dev/writing/dht22-humidity-monitoring/A Raspberry Pi, a DHT22, InfluxDB and Grafana — and what a humidity monitor taught me about writing long-running processes that stay running.Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMTraspberry-pipythonmonitoringhomelab