How I Stopped Fake Sign-Ups with Invisible reCAPTCHA v3

Tags: Homelab , Self-Hosting

Published March 24, 2026, 2:52 a.m. by wielandtech

I used to get a steady stream of fake accounts and spam through my sign-up and contact forms. Not a huge volume, but enough to be annoying and make me question my data.

So I added Invisible reCAPTCHA v3. Since then, I haven't had a single fake account.

Why reCAPTCHA v3?

It works differently than the old checkbox version. There's no "I'm not a robot" challenge.

Instead, it gives each request a score based on how human it looks. You decide what score is acceptable and block the rest. Real users never see anything.

How I Implemented It

1. Load the script

``` html

```

2. Attach it to form submission

``` javascript async function getRecaptchaToken(action) { return await grecaptcha.execute("YOUR_SITE_KEY", { action }); }

document.querySelector("#signup-form").addEventListener("submit", async (e) => …

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Real-Time Monitoring with Netdata

Tags: DevOps , Homelab , Observability

Published Jan. 25, 2026, 9:19 a.m. by wielandtech

I've been running a Kubernetes homelab for a while now, and while I've written about the setup before, I recently added something new that I'm pretty excited about: live cluster metrics on the homelab page.

What's New

The homelab page used to be pretty static--just a list of what's running and some hardware specs. Now it shows real-time metrics pulled directly from my cluster. CPU usage, memory, network traffic, disk I/O, temperatures, pod counts, deployment health, and uptime--all updating every second.

It's powered by Netdata agents running on each of my three nodes. I've been using Netdata alongside Prometheus and Grafana for a while, but I never exposed the data publicly before. The API is straightforward, and it gives me exactly what I need without the overhead of querying Prometheus for simple metrics.

The Metrics

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New Beginnings

Tags: Golang , Job Search

Published Nov. 7, 2025, 3:31 a.m. by wielandtech

In case you've been living under a rock, the job market for software engineers in 2025 has been pretty abysmal. It for this reason that I am proud to announce that I've landed a new role.

Not only is it a role, but judging from my first two weeks it's going to be an awesome role! It's a small, remote company which has been experiencing astronomical growth. My team is brand new, with high impact and visibility. I am immensely grateful for the opportunity be the team's scrum master while also getting paid to learn golang.

In light of this achievement, I wanted to share the struggle that got me here: 8 months of unemployment and 380 job applications submitted.

2025 Job Search SanKey

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