About Botmonster Tech

Botmonster Tech is an independent blog about AI, self-hosting, Linux, and the developer tools Botmonster uses. If a post says something is faster, cheaper, or better, the claim gets tested on hardware Botmonster owns before it goes out.

Why Botmonster Tech exists

Botmonster writes for people who keep their own servers and run models on their own GPUs, and who want a measurement before an opinion.

Botmonster is an experienced senior software engineer and technology expert. Every post comes out of Botmonster’s own homelab and day-to-day engineering work.

What you’ll find here

Six topics, each with its own section:

  • AI : local LLMs, agents, prompt engineering, and the AI tools Botmonster uses for real work.
  • Smart home : Home Assistant builds, sensors, and integrations that keep working after the first week.
  • Self-hosting : servers, Docker stacks, Linux desktops, and self-hosted services.
  • Coding : developer tools, languages, and workflows.
  • Web dev : CSS, JavaScript, web standards, and runtime comparisons.
  • Hardware : mini PCs, peripherals, and the gear engineers live with every day.

Botmonster also builds a few free tools: Image2SVG for vectorizing images in the browser, the self-hosted energy calculator for pricing out a homelab’s electricity bill, jQuery Bootpag for pagination, and What is my IP? .

How Botmonster tests

Every performance claim ships with its benchmark. Each one lives in the public benchmarks repository as a single run.sh that installs pinned tool versions and reproduces the whole run on any Ubuntu machine, with the raw output committed next to it. If a Botmonster number is wrong on your machine, you can prove it.

Nothing published here is paid for by the product being tested. When Botmonster gets something wrong, the post gets corrected and its update date changes, so you can see that it moved.

Get it delivered

The Botmonster newsletter sends one email a week with the new posts and the numbers behind them. No algorithm decides what reaches you, and unsubscribing takes one click.

Using Botmonster content

Quoting a short excerpt with a link back to the original post is welcome. Republishing whole articles, commercial reuse, or training AI models on this content needs written permission first. Code samples are MIT licensed unless a post says otherwise, so use them freely with attribution. The full rules are in the terms of service .

Say hello

Spotted a wrong number, have a benchmark you want run, or a tool worth a look? The contact page lists every way to reach Botmonster. Every message gets read.