Software Engineer · Homelab Operator · Chicago, IL
Dan Dewar is a software engineer based in Addison, IL (Chicago suburbs) with an established presence in the self-hosting and homelab community. He works at OPENLANE and operates stinger, a 4U rackmount NixOS server running dual GPUs (Tesla P4 + RTX 3060) for local AI inference. Dan is an automation-first DevOps practitioner who runs Hermes Agent, manages a full self-hosted stack (Mealie, Immich, FreshRSS, ComfyUI, Home Assistant), and is active in the Chicago pickleball scene as part of the Sky Scrapers team.
The name "Dan Dewar" is shared with a chiropractor in Portage, IN and a basketball coach in Saskatoon, which creates signal noise in broad searches. The findings below have been curated to focus on our Dan — the homelab operator and software engineer.
Handle: ddewar — 8 repositories. Active in the NixOS and Home Assistant ecosystems. The most recent 30-day activity includes code contributions and starred repos in the self-hosting space. (Unauthenticated tier — rate-limited)
X activity under the @dandewar76 and @DDewar10 handles yielded posts mostly from sports/basketball-related accounts. Dan's primary communication channels appear to be Matrix and Discord rather than X.
Reddit mentions of "Dan Dewar" appear primarily in r/hockey, r/HHN, and r/anchorage — likely referring to other individuals with the same name. Dan's Reddit footprint is minimal under his real name; he may use alternate handles.
YouTube results for "Dan Dewar" are dominated by other creators. The high view count (~65M) reflects popular content that happens to include the name in metadata, not Dan's personal channel activity.
HN mentions are sparse and mostly tangentially related. Dan does not appear to have an active HN presence under his real name.
| Role | Software Engineer at OPENLANE |
| Location | Addison, IL (Chicago suburbs) |
| Education | Butler University |
| 232 connections | |
| GitHub | ddewar · 8 repositories |
| OS | NixOS (Linux 6.18.35) |
| Chassis | Chenbro RM41300-FS81 (4U rackmount, 8 PCI slots) |
| GPU 1 | Tesla P4 (50W, inference) |
| GPU 2 | RTX 3060 (170W, compute) |
| Agent | Hermes Agent (Nous Research) — running Cave Johnson 2.3beta45 personality |
| Self-Hosted Stack | Mealie, Immich, FreshRSS, ComfyUI, Home Assistant, Rallly, Piper TTS, SearXNG |
| ML Stack | Local LLMs (llama.cpp, vLLM), Stable Diffusion (ComfyUI), Whisper, OCR |
| Pickleball Team | Chicago Sky Scrapers (Slapshot Pickleball League) |
| Role | Team coordinator, pregame/postgame automation, goals tracking |
| Other | Hockey fan (Chicago CT area) |
| Wife | Kim |
| Daughter | Hazel (b. Feb 2024) |
| Dog | Wally (Labradoodle) |
| Zone | 6b (60101) — gardening |
Based on session data and system artifacts, here's what Dan has been working on in the past month:
nixos-build-triage skill. Extracted deprecation warnings from the charlie build including greetd.tuigreet rename, virtualisation.podman.enableNvidia deprecation, and hardware.nvidia-container-toolkit.enable replacement.Dan's homelab is a showcase of modern self-hosting on NixOS. Here's the current toolchain:
| Category | Tools |
|---|---|
| AI Agent | Hermes Agent (Nous Research) · Profiles: default, ollama-gemma4 |
| LLM Serving | llama.cpp (GGUF), vLLM (OpenAI API compatible) |
| Image Gen | ComfyUI (local Stable Diffusion), FLUX 2 Klein 9B (FAL.ai) |
| Media | Immich (photos), FreshRSS (RSS), YouTube transcripts |
| Meal Planning | Mealie with MCP integration |
| Home Automation | Home Assistant, OpenHue (Philips Hue) |
| Smart Home | OpenHue, calendar integration |
| Scheduling | Rallly polls, cron jobs |
| Voice/TTS | Piper TTS (Wyoming protocol) |
| Search | SearXNG (private metasearch), crawl4ai (JS fetcher) |
| Task Tracking | Donetick (chore/task tracker) |
| Communication | Matrix, Discord |
| Productivity | Obsidian vault, Notion, Airtable, Google Workspace |
| Himalaya CLI, Gmail automation, nightly triage workflows |