The Terraria Server Odyssey: A Tour of Modern Deployment Options

A note from the co-author: This post was written collaboratively with Claude, who also did most of the actual infrastructure work — reading docs, writing Ansible roles, debugging crashed services over SSH, and talking me out of increasingly cursed networking solutions. When we hit the Fly.io memory wall at 2am, Claude suggested the boring VPS approach that actually worked. Fair to say this server wouldn’t be running without the assist. — Zac ...

February 1, 2026 · 5 min · 1037 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

Building a Non-Deterministic Merge Game with LLMs

What I Built and Why I’ve always enjoyed those element-combining merge games like Doodle God or Little Alchemy. You know the ones - Water + Fire = Steam, Earth + Water = Mud, that sort of thing. There’s something satisfying about discovering combinations, but after playing a few, I started noticing a fundamental limitation: every combination is pre-determined. Everyone who plays gets exactly the same results. The discovery phase is fun, but once you know the combinations, there’s no variance. ...

November 1, 2025 · 5 min · 1026 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

AI written cover letters fun and profit.

In today’s newly competitive tech jobs market, it’s more important than ever to have a well-written cover letter when applying for a job. It’s your opportunity to make a great first impression and set yourself apart from other candidates. But writing a unique and compelling cover letter for each job you apply to can be time-consuming and daunting. That’s where GPT-3 comes in. GPT-3, or Generative Pretrained Transformer 3, is a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI. It has been trained on a massive amount of text data, allowing it to generate human-like text on a wide range of topics. In this post, we’ll show you how to use GPT-3 to generate custom cover letters for job applications. ...

December 4, 2022 · 4 min · 769 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

Running Rust on Arm with docker

I have a small home lab kubernetes cluster running k3s from rancher labs. As part of that deployment, the traefik ingress controller is included. This post is first in a series where I muddle through exploring the traefik ingress using a rust webserver. Covered in this post. Rust workloads on k8s with ARM and Docker. What will be running? Since my home lab cluster runs on 4 raspberry pi’s, some work will be needed to get a properly formatted image. For this I’ll be using docker buildx to build our images for multiple targets. This post will review the steps needed to get a working docker image deployed onto an ARM cluster using docker and kubernetes. ...

May 8, 2020 · 2 min · 246 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

Run home assistant in k3s - IOT for everyone

As a new home owner and nerd, I’ve been leaning into the “smart home” trend. Naturally, this makes for a great excuse to tinker with the latest IOT technology and to experiment with distributed computing. What better test bed for working with the ‘Service Mesh’ than coordinating micro-computer devices and sensors? To that end, I’ve chosen to use Rancher’s IOT focused kubernetes distribution k3s. I plan to write more about my setup in the future but, for now I’d just like to share my configuration for running the HomeAssistant platform on kubernetes cluster with a zwave gateway. ...

May 28, 2019 · 1 min · 137 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>