Hey, I'm Vlad Mocanu. With 20+ years in the tech trenches, I've seen it all—from bare-metal servers that needed a hug to cloud-native architectures that scale like magic. These days, I'm all about Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies, somewhere between obsession and true love. If it runs in a container or orchestrates with Kubernetes, I'm probably already tinkering with it—often with an AI teammate by my side.
By day, I help teams adopt Kubernetes and Cloud Native technologies. By night, I run a homelab that's probably more complex than it needs to be — and I'm here to share what I learn along the way. More about me →
Why This Blog?
Three reasons:
- Share learnings — Help others avoid the mistakes I’ve already made
- Document for myself — A searchable brain dump for future me
- Build in public — Show the messy journey, not just polished results
What You’ll Find Here
This isn’t theoretical content. Everything comes from running real workloads on real hardware:
The Stack
- 3x Proxmox nodes running Kubernetes (Spectro Cloud)
- Flux CD managing 90+ applications via GitOps
- Forgejo hosting 230+ repositories
Topics I Write About
- Kubernetes patterns and operations
- Crossplane compositions and IaC
- CI/CD with Forgejo Actions and Flux CD
- Self-hosted services (Harbor, Nextcloud, Wiki.js)
- Custom tooling I’ve built (s3bkp, kcl-ci, git-manager)
- AI-assisted development with Claude Code
A Note on AI
You’ll notice “with a splash of AI” in the title. Most of my recent work involves Claude Code and various MCP integrations for Kubernetes operations, migrations, Grafana dashboards, and documentation lookups. I’ll share what works, what doesn’t, and how AI is changing my workflow.
Full transparency: This blog itself was built with Claude Code, and the articles written with its help. The structure, ideas, and content reflect my own work and experience — Claude is the co-pilot, not the author.
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