whoami
Paul Bennett — Lead Solutions Engineer, AdTech
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I'm Paul, a Lead Solutions Engineer in AdTech based in Dorset, UK. I live in the terminal, write mostly Python and SQL (and I'm learning Go), build things with AI, and tinker with my Kubernetes homelab.
I like making technology easy to understand and interesting to learn about. Husband, dog dad and biker. More about me →
ls ~/writes-about
Latest posts
All posts →Fixing Discord Alerts on kube-prometheus-stack
My Alertmanager Was Silently Dead for Two Days: Fixing Discord Alerts on kube-prometheus-stack
Managing Talos machine config with patches, mise and hunk
My homelab cluster, portland, is three Dell OptiPlex 7060 Micros running Talos Linux. All three are control-plane nodes that also run workloads. Everything inside Kubernetes is GitOps'd through Argo CD, but the Talos machine config underneath it was... not. I'd been changing nodes with talosctl patch machineconfig, one patch at a time, and slowly losing track of what was actually on each box.
Setting up SeaweedFS
When it comes to homelab and storage there are many options, and for a long while MinIO was the default answer. Spin up a container, point your apps at it, done. It just worked, so nobody really questioned it.
Intercepting iOS App Traffic with mitmproxy CLI & Web UI Guide
Intercepting HTTP(S) traffic from a real iOS device is a powerful way to understand what your app (or any third‑party app) is sending and receiving—without Xcode, without re‑signing, and without touching a simulator. This guide provides a streamlined setup process and covers both the command‑line interface (CLI) and the Web UI (mitmweb) for capturing, filtering, and modifying your mobile traffic.
Switching themes automatically in Neovim
We're going to be using Catppuccin and this setup is generally for MacOS but this idea will work on Linux too. On macOS, you can run this shell command in Lua to get the current system appearance: