Home Lab
Independent software work outside the clinical informatics role. These are personal projects - exploratory, opinionated, and explicitly not part of the leadership work documented elsewhere on this site. They exist to keep the hands close to the metal and an outlet for a never-ending desire to learn and explore.
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Summer School
publicSelf-paced, interactive STEM learning platform for kids ages 7-13, with more than 400 interactive courses. Built as a platform for my children to continue learning once the school year ends.
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Faculty Coaching
publicAcademic coaching practice focused on faculty in academic medicine - including career coaching for physicians. Specifically passionate about coaching physicians interested in building a career in Health IT.
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Five-Letter Domain [fld.sh]
publicReal-world technical solutions and configurations from actual infrastructure work. What started as personal notes has evolved into a comprehensive resource covering Linux system administration, networking, storage management, and virtualization.
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Orc AI
privateMulti-agent workflow orchestrator that tracks agent usage and can increase or decrease work to optimize subscription-based token usage. Runs my personal development infrastructure - including the project migrations and tooling work behind this site - under a single goal-driven agent runtime.
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OJournal
invite onlySelf-hosted, privacy-first journaling. Entries, attachments, and search index are encrypted at rest under a three-tier key hierarchy (UK → SK → DK); the database on its own is useless to an attacker. Designed to run on a single box behind TLS. First began as a Java-based blogging platform in 2004, ported to PHP, and now to a Rust API with a Vue frontend.
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Inventory
privateSource-of-truth inventory system for physical and virtual hosts at home and in offsite datacenters, inspired by NetBox Labs.
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IAC
privateAnsible-based infrastructure-as-code for the homelab and offsite-datacenter hosts that run everything above. Configuration in version control, idempotent provisioning, no manual SSH. Ultimate goal is better-than-cloud self-hosted infrastructure.
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keyboot
alphaA greenfield boot stage for ZFS-on-LUKS hosts. It unlocks every encrypted device from an age-encrypted keyfile, imports the root pool, offers a boot environment picker over TTY or SSH, and kexecs into the chosen kernel. The same artifact doubles as a netboot rescue shell and unattended installer for Gentoo, Debian, and Alpine on UEFI and BIOS.
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Drop
invite onlySimple API and web interface to support passing secrets to agents while keeping the secrets out of the chat log.
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swim-assist
publicA website for families to track USA Swimming swimmers' progress: meet times, age-group motivational standards, championship and sectional cuts, goal setting, and a little gamification. Mobile-first and print-friendly, with USA Swimming kept as the source of truth. A useful first version shipped in two days.
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itop
privateA lightweight, single-row system monitor for zellij panes - an htop alternative that reads /proc directly and renders one compact line of CPU, I/O, memory, swap, and load. Negligible footprint, built to run many instances at once.
Archive
Earlier iterations of personal hosting and side projects, preserved via the Internet Archive.
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htmlfarm.com
retiredEarly personal web project from the htmlfarm.com era. Snapshot from January 2002 preserved on the Internet Archive.
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gentoovps.net
retiredGentoo Linux VPS hosting project. Snapshot from May 2014 preserved on the Internet Archive.
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Blog
retiredA small archive of early-2010s posts on oncology informatics, internal medicine, hardware, and tools. Preserved at the original slugs for continuity with any inbound links.
Frequently asked questions
- What is Dr. Osterman's home lab?
- The home lab is Dr. Osterman's independent software practice outside his clinical informatics role. It is a set of personal, exploratory projects spanning agentic systems, self-hosted infrastructure, journaling, education, and inventory. They are explicitly separate from his leadership work and exist to keep his hands close to the metal and to satisfy a continual desire to learn and explore.
- What agentic systems has Dr. Osterman built?
- Dr. Osterman built Orc AI, a multi-agent workflow orchestrator written in Rust that tracks agent usage and can increase or decrease work to optimize subscription-based token usage. It runs his personal development infrastructure, including the project migrations and tooling behind this site, under a single goal-driven agent runtime. He also built Drop, an API and web interface for passing secrets to agents while keeping those secrets out of the chat log.
- What self-hosted infrastructure does Dr. Osterman run?
- Dr. Osterman runs self-hosted infrastructure across his homelab and offsite datacenters. This includes an Ansible-based infrastructure-as-code project for idempotent provisioning with configuration in version control and no manual SSH, plus a source-of-truth inventory system for physical and virtual hosts inspired by NetBox Labs. His stated goal is better-than-cloud self-hosted infrastructure.
- What is OJournal?
- OJournal is Dr. Osterman's self-hosted, privacy-first journaling application. Entries, attachments, and the search index are encrypted at rest under a three-tier key hierarchy, so the database on its own is useless to an attacker. It is designed to run on a single box behind TLS. The project began as a Java-based blogging platform in 2004, was ported to PHP, and is now a Rust and Axum backend with a Vue frontend.
- What is Summer School?
- Summer School is a self-paced, interactive STEM learning platform Dr. Osterman built for kids ages 7 to 13, with more than 400 interactive courses. He created it as a platform for his children to keep learning once the school year ends.