Wow, I haven't blogged since July. That checks out.

I've been very busy. Whether I'm working seven days a week, pulling all-nighters on Rasberry™, or disappearing into another LLM Controller CE update, apparently I know how to keep myself occupied.

Rasberry™ Hosting is now actively serving customer VMs, and I've been continuously improving the Account Management Portal since launch in August.

AMP has already gained a bunch of new customer-facing functionality, including VM reinstall, opening all firewall ports, subscription cancellation, automatic daily VM backups and restore, real-time server status, and Authenticator 2FA.

I've also done a full cleanup and typography consistency pass across the interface, and updated the base Ubuntu installation for tighter integration with AMP and a better experience right from first boot.

Behind all of that, the entire hosting cluster is backed up daily to a dedicated backup cluster.

We've also had nearly 100% uptime since launch. The only significant interruption wasn't actually a VM or hardware outage at all. An ISP outage took the host running AMP offline for around eight hours, while customer VMs continued running normally.

As of writing, the cluster itself is sitting at 162 days of uptime, dating back well before public signups opened.

On the open-source side, LLM Controller CE has been moving just as quickly.

Since my last blog post I've just released the 3rd major version!

LLM Controller CE has grown into much more than another llama.cpp wrapper. It's a workspace, model test bench, project manager, OpenAI-compatible API host, and a growing collection of tools for actually working with local models.

LLM Controller CE v1.4 puts a big focus on Voice and the overall user experience, including local speech-to-text so you can talk directly to your model whether the model itself supports audio or not. No external API required.

In considerably less software-related news, Jamie and I spent our one-year wedding anniversary in a beautiful condo in Whistler, up on Blackcomb Mountain and about as far away from everyone else as we could reasonably get.

We cooked at home, disconnected from everything, and relaxed our faces off for a few days. It was great.

Naturally, I came home and started tearing apart the server room.

I'm currently working through soundproofing, new drywall, fresh paint, and an entirely new cooling setup. It's one of those projects where every completed job reveals another job underneath it, but it's coming together.

So yeah.

I haven't blogged since July.

That checks out. I skipped a lot, too.

With a little over a week until I get married, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot lately. If you know me, you know I work a lot. It’s not like me to spend much time in reflection — I’m usually looking forward, moving ahead. But Jamie and I have been together for nearly nine years now, and one of my biggest takeaways is just how much I’ve grown in that time.

Back in 2016, we were both just kids. In some ways, even in our mid-30s, we still are — but we’ve grown a lot, both of us. When my last relationship ended, I didn’t know it then, but it was for the better. 2016 was one of the hardest years of my life for more reasons than I care to unpack here, but in that same year I had arguably the best summer of my life. I learned who truly mattered, who didn’t, made friends I still have today, and started one of the most surreal jobs anyone could imagine — one I still hold to this day.

The day before 2016 began — New Year’s Eve — I met Jamie. I didn’t know it then, but she’d become one of the most important people I’d ever meet: my closest friend, my true partner, and in just over a week — nearly ten years after that first meeting — my wife.

When I proposed to Jamie on Christmas Day in 2023, I didn’t expect anything to really change. We’d already built a life together. But in the months since, I’ve realized things do feel different. My perspective has shifted — on myself, the people around me, and especially my relationship with Jamie. A boss and friend asked me recently if I thought marriage would change anything. At first, I almost said no, but instead I found myself admitting: “I’ll probably cool it on the partying, and give Jamie even more of the respect she deserves, since she’ll be my wife after all.” Not that I’ve been disrespectful, but I can get carried away when I drink. Truthfully, that’s less of an issue now — we’ve both slowed down on drinking these last few years — but still, it was an honest answer.

At the end of the day, Jamie and I already share a life. We’ve owned a house together for nearly five years, we’ve built a business together, and I’ve been part of raising her daughter, Payton, since she was nine. Now she’s 18, driving her own car, working full-time — and I still can’t believe how fast that’s happened. All this to say: Jamie and I already are partners. Getting married is just making it “government official” (a little more official than Facebook official 😅). People already call her my wife, and honestly, I’ve been saying it more often too.

I’m excited. Sure, maybe not much will change day-to-day, and that’s fine. We’ve got a good life. We look out for each other. We argue sometimes, but less so in recent years — and when we do, it’s because we care. You don’t fight for things you don’t believe in.

We balance each other in all the right ways. We see the world differently, but together we see more. At 36, I couldn’t have imagined a better partner to marry than Jamie. Marriage won’t change who we are — it’s a continuation of the life we’ve built — but it does mark the start of every year still to come, and I can’t wait.