Daniel Mikusa

CodeMash 2026

It’s hard to believe CodeMash 2026 has already come and gone! As always, it was a fantastic conference, and I’m truly humbled to have had the opportunity to speak. A special thanks to everyone who attended my talk—especially those who stayed for the final session on Friday afternoon. I’m thrilled with how it turned out and hope you all came away with some useful insights.

While sessions weren’t recorded this year, both the slides and demos are available on my GitHub. If you have any questions, feel free to open an issue on the repo. I’d love to hear from you!

Read more...

I previously wrote about the hardware I bought for my new NAS. In this post, I’m going to go through the choices I made for the operating system and filesystem layout.

Operating System

Every great server starts with an operating system. For my NAS, I picked Ubuntu 24.04.

While there are a lot of great choices, this one seemed like a natural fit for me. I’ve been using Ubuntu for a long time, almost 20 years, so I’m familiar with it. That version is also an LTS version, so I’ll get plenty of life out of it before I even need to contemplate upgrading.

Read more...

I am beyond excited to be speaking at CodeMash 2026 this year! My talk: Model Context Protocol: A Systems Integration Perspective was accepted.

Abstract

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is everywhere these days. It’s often presented as a revolutionary new paradigm that’s going to replace everything, but at its core, it’s simply another interface for fetching data and performing remote actions—like REST or RPC. This session reframes MCP through a systems integration lens, demonstrating how to integrate it with your existing systems rather than replacing them entirely.

Read more...

Way back in 2015, I built a NAS. I’d had a “NAS” before, but it was old/spare parts cobbled together to approximate a NAS. This was the first NAS I built, where I bought parts specifically to make a NAS.

I remember doing some research, but ultimately just deciding to go with this wonderful guide from Brian C Moses. It was not the most powerful box, but it did what I needed and I got about 10 years out of it, so I’d say it was a success.

Read more...

After a long time of using Python & Flask as the base for my site, I’ve switched over to Hugo. My site doesn’t change very often, so this move makes a lot of sense. It’s easier to host and no more Python updates to keep up with.

The move was pretty easy. I created a new Hugo project and copied all my static resources from the old site to the /static directory of my Hugo project. Then I took my Python Jinja2 templates layout and used it for the base of my default layout in Hugo (i.e. baseof.html). I was then able to add content for the pages of my site, and lastly copy over the posts that I wanted to keep.

Read more...