Security on Greg Herlein

Why Not Use Shelly Cloud (And Why That's the Highest Compliment I Can Pay It)

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:01 -0800

I disable the cloud on every Shelly plug in my house. And that is exactly why I love Shelly.

Stay with me, because that sounds backwards. A friend called me on a different version of it: “You’re the local-LAN guy, but you use Ubiquiti’s UniFi cloud API to run your networks. Pick a lane.” Fair hit. It looks inconsistent. It isn’t — I was just naming the principle wrong.

Stop Putting Your UniFi Admin Password in an Env Var

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

There’s a command line in the gofi post I wrote ten days ago that has been quietly bugging me ever since I hit publish:

gofips -H 10.20.30.1 -k --get > hosts.conf

Look at that -k. That’s me telling the tool “don’t bother checking the TLS certificate.” And the part you can’t see is worse: my UniFi admin username and password, sitting in environment variables. Both of those were compromises I made to get the thing working. Neither of them sat well.

A Chainsaw at an Axe-Chopping Contest: My Current Agentic Loop

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

People keep asking me how I actually work with Claude Code now. Not the “does AI coding work” question — I’ve beaten that horse into glue on this blog already — but the boring, practical, how-does-my-loop-actually-work question. So here it is. The whole rig. And fair warning: what I’m about to describe is a chainsaw, and most of the industry is still lined up at the axe-chopping contest.