About this site
Packet Pulse is a daily briefing on the parts of tech I actually run: networking, UniFi, cybersecurity, AI, and the homelab/Proxmox world that ties them together.
Every morning at 6am Eastern, it scans the web for what moved overnight, throws out the duplicates and the noise, picks the stories worth your time, and drafts them up in plain language. Then I read it, fix what needs fixing, and publish. One post a day. No filler, no rewritten press releases, no "10 things you need to know" that you already knew.
Who's behind it
I'm Mike, a Senior Principal Software Engineer with 30+ years in enterprise infrastructure and customer escalations, based in the Upstate of South Carolina. My day job is identifying, addressing and fixing things for very large customers. My nights and weekends go to a Proxmox homelab, a Kubernetes cluster that has no business being in a residential house, and a self-hosted MSP practice for small businesses in the Clemson corridor.
Packet Pulse started because I was spending an hour every morning reading the same twenty sources to find the three items that mattered. So I built something to do it for me, and then figured you might want it too.
How the sausage is made
I'll be upfront: Packet Pulse is an automated pipeline, and I built every stage of it.
- Research — 22 targeted searches across networking, security, AI, and homelab sources
- Dedup — three-layer matching (URL fingerprint, fuzzy title, semantic topic) so the same story from six outlets shows up once
- Curation — an AI model ranks what's worth covering and drops the rest
- Writing — a second model drafts the post, with my editorial rules baked in
- Review and publish — the draft lands in my queue, not on your screen. I read it, check the sources, cut what's weak, rewrite what's wrong, and hit publish myself. Then it goes out as the email digest.
That last step is the whole point. The automation exists to do the reading and the first draft so I don't have to; it does not get to decide what you see. Nothing is published without me signing off on it, and plenty of drafts don't make it past me.
It runs on FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Claude and local Ollama models, Brave Search, and a scheduler running in my home server rack. I wrote the code, I tune the prompts, I pick the topics, and I own every word that ships. When the pipeline gets something wrong upstream, I fix the pipeline, not just the post.
If you're the kind of reader who wants to know whether a human is involved: yes, on every single issue. If you're the kind who wants to know how it works under the hood: I'll be writing about that too.
Why subscribe
It's free, and it's one email a day. Delivered before your coffee's done, sized to be read in five minutes.
It's curated by someone who lives in this stuff. The topic list reflects what I run, troubleshoot, and get paged about. If it wouldn't matter to me on a Tuesday morning, it doesn't make the cut.
It skips the hype cycle. AI coverage here is about what you can deploy, not what somebody raised a round for. Security coverage is about what you need to patch, not what's trending.
You'll see the pipeline evolve. Weekly video recaps and deeper dives are on the roadmap. Subscribers hear about them first.
No ads, no sponsored posts, no selling your address. Unsubscribe is one click and I won't take it personally.
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Questions, corrections, or a source I should be watching? Reply to any issue. I read every response.
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