I am Kate G. I am not a developer, and I never learned to write code properly. I still build things: a journal app, a stock dashboard, an analytics tool, this site. They exist because I wanted them and nobody was going to make them for me.
Most guides about this stuff are written from the documentation. You can tell, because they stop exactly where the documentation stops: right before the part where the thing refuses to do what the guide assumed was trivial. This site is written from the other side of that wall. Everything here I actually ran, and the parts that did not work the first time are written down as failures rather than quietly skipped.
What actually runs where
This site is a static site published on Cloudflare Pages. It costs nothing to host, and it stays up whether or not anything at my house is switched on.
The hardware is where my other things live. A UGREEN NAS running UGOS sits at
home with several long-lived services behind one free Cloudflare Tunnel, no
public IP address, no forwarded ports, and Tailscale for private access. That box
comes with a pile of constraints most guides never mention: an SSH account with
no sudo and no access to the Docker socket, no unzip, no usable cron, no
rsync. Working inside those limits is where a lot of the writing here comes
from.
So when a post talks about running things at home, that is the NAS, not this site. Where each thing lives is named in the post.
What you can expect
Tested unless stated otherwise. If something here has not been personally run, the text says so. There is no house style of implying experience that does not exist.
Failures included. The wrong turns are usually more useful than the happy path, so they stay in.
No paid recommendations. As of today there are no affiliate links, no ads, and no sponsored content anywhere on this site. See Disclosure, which gets updated before that ever changes rather than after.
Free-first, but honest about the ceiling. The bias here is toward the zero-cost option, because most of this genuinely does not need to cost anything. Where free stops being good enough, that gets said plainly instead of papered over.
Corrections
Corrections are welcome and get made. If something here is wrong, out of date, or behaves differently on your hardware, email support@lookmanocode.com and the page gets fixed.
2026-07-30. This page used to say that the site itself was served from the NAS at home over a Cloudflare Tunnel. That was true of an earlier plan and never true of what shipped: the site has been on Cloudflare Pages since it launched. Two posts implied the same thing and have been corrected. Leaving the record here rather than quietly editing it, since being wrong about my own setup is exactly the kind of thing this site claims not to do.