Brian
Kimball
Welcome to the Atomic Drafting Room
Why I tore down the Renaissance Technical design and rebuilt the site in Raygun Gothic — atomic starbursts, chrome typography, and a turquoise-coral-gold palette that finally feels like me.
Bringing AI to IBM i: An MCP Server with 31 System Tools
A BYOK MCP server that exposes 31 facade tools for IBM i observability, job management, and security. Built to train new users and accelerate expert workflows.
Surveyor: A Field-Tested Network Discovery Tool for MSPs
From Raspberry Pi prototype to Wails desktop app: how Surveyor replaces manual nmap commands with stealth scanning and RFC 1918 auto-discovery.
Renaissance Technical: Designing with AI
How I used OpenCode and Gemini to build a "Renaissance Technical" design system that pits rigid grids against organic circles—and why AI is the brush, not the painter.
Designing Fully Redundant Infrastructure: Physical and Logical Layers Explained
How redundant compute, SAN mirroring, load balancers with CARP, and synchronous database clustering eliminate both hardware failures and maintenance windows.
A Production-Ready Knex Dialect for IBM i DB2
Streaming queries, emulated RETURNING, multi-row inserts, and a custom migration runner. This is the Knex dialect I wish existed when I started building on IBM i.
TanStack Hono: A Lightweight SSR Monolith Without the Meta-Framework Weight
Single-process SSR + CSR with type-safe RPC, Vite, React, and Hono. The goal is low operational complexity without giving up dynamic UI.
Building a Type-Safe Full-Stack Starter with Fastify and Astro
A complete starter template combining Astro, Fastify, tRPC, Lucia, React, NextUI, and Drizzle into a single type-safe monolith.
Life Update
Marriage, a new baby, and a pivot from Raspberry Pi tools to desktop apps. Here is what I have been building during the quiet months.