I've spent most of my career as a Unix sysadmin — the kind of work where you learn, over time, that the machine doesn't care how pretty your dashboard is. It cares whether you notice the thing that matters, in time.
Eventually I came home from that and kept doing the same thing for myself. A homelab grew. Home Assistant, a UniFi stack, Uptime Kuma, Kopia backups, a couple of always-on services, GitHub Actions for side projects, the calendar and reminders that actually run my life. Seven browser tabs every morning, each speaking its own language, none of them talking to each other.
Dashboards didn't solve it — dashboards ask you to look at them. What I wanted was the Unix instinct expressed through the Mac: the power of the terminal and the craft of native macOS design, in one surface. One timeline, everything that happened, in order, with the right action one click away. Local-first, because the data stays on my machines. LAN-reachable, because the services don't run on the Mac. Never acts on its own, because silent automations are how you lose trust in your own system.
Tempo is that tool.