~/juan $ whoami
Juan Carranza
Electronics engineer who codes and 3D-prints. I design circuits, write firmware, and break things on purpose so I can write about fixing them.
Things I've made
in progress
Homelab Kubernetes Cluster
A self-hosted k8s cluster running on old hardware, exploring container orchestration, GitOps with Flux, and self-hosted services.
shipped
PrintForHelp
An open-source coordination platform connecting people who need 3D-printed parts with makers who own printers. Built in three days after the June 2026 Venezuela earthquake, now running at printforhelp.org.
in progress
Piezario
A desktop app for makers to organize a personal catalog of 3D models and work out what a print actually costs. No database, no import step — the folder on your disk is the database.
Latest writing
Wired Ethernet 'connected' but no internet without Wi-Fi (and stuck at 100 Mb/s)
My desktop said the cable was connected, yet the moment I turned Wi-Fi off the internet was gone. Three separate problems were stacked on top of each other: a dead DNS server, ARP flux between two NICs on the same subnet, and a forgotten ethtool command capping the link at 100 Mb/s.
PrintForHelp: what my wife and I built after the Venezuela earthquake
On June 24 two earthquakes hit northern Venezuela. Within days the maker community was printing splints for the injured — and drowning in WhatsApp messages. This is how we ended up building a platform to organize it.
Fixing Steam 'opens then closes' on Linux (the steamwebhelper crash loop)
Steam launched from the .deb would flash a window and vanish on Ubuntu 26.04. It wasn't missing libs, the GPU driver, or AppArmor — it was the bundled Chromium UI crash-looping. Here's how I tracked it down and fixed it.
// cat ~/now.md — updated this week
- Working on my homelab k8s cluster
- Planning a trip to Hawai with my wife — She loves Mohana!