Beyond the terminal
What keeps me thinking outside work
Music, complex games and home automation are more than a list of hobbies. Each develops focus, collaboration and the ability to find a solution that actually works.
Collaboration and rhythm
Music as a team discipline
I play bass and sing in the Příbram folk-rock band O.K.mžik. Bass is not always the most visible instrument, but it holds the whole arrangement together — much like well-designed infrastructure.
Playing live teaches me to listen, respond in real time and own my part of a shared result. There is more about the band in this interview on pribram.cz.
Personal lab
Home Assistant instead of Homebridge
A year ago I replaced Homebridge with Home Assistant and have gradually made it the home's unified, locally controlled foundation. It connects lighting, heating, media, sensors and garden automation, backed by a segmented MikroTik network, reverse proxy and services running on a home iMac.
The interesting part is not the number of integrations but designing a dependable whole: automation should help without getting in the way, and sensible manual control must remain when the cloud or central service is unavailable. Security, observability and operational simplicity naturally become part of this personal project.
Complex systems
Path of Exile 2 and finding the connections
I spend a fair amount of time in Path of Exile 2. I enjoy its interconnected systems, build design and the trade-offs between performance, resilience and constrained resources. A good solution rarely arrives as one grand idea; it emerges through experiments, measurements and iteration.
It is a satisfyingly demanding counterpoint to work — and good practice in navigating complexity. My gaming PC has been running Bazzite for some time; its Linux environment gives me the speed, stability and polished gaming experience I want. I also enjoy Kingdom Come: Deliverance, strategy games and simulations where choices have consequences and problems admit more than one route. You can find my collection on Steam.
Hands-on projects
A cottage, energy and practical work
My cottage in Lisovice provides time away from screens and a place to see what technology means in practice. A robotic mower, heating controls and the combination of a boiler, wood stove and heat pump are tangible systems where reliability, consumption and straightforward operation all matter.
Films, science fiction, documentaries about technology and society, and the intelligent humour of the Jára Cimrman Theatre provide a wider perspective — and a reminder that a technical solution is rarely the only possible one.
