Kai Chen

Kai Chen spent eight years building backend systems before he turned his apartment balcony into a functioning food production setup. The first attempt — a Kratky tub with a $6 aquarium light — worked. That was the problem.

Once the lettuce started growing, the questions multiplied. Why does the air gap matter? What EC level should the nutrient solution be at week three? What's the simplest way to add an ESP32 moisture sensor without overengineering it? The answers were scattered across Reddit threads, YouTube comments, and GitHub issues in firmware repos that hadn't been updated since 2019.

sudo.farm exists because Kai couldn't find the resource he needed when he was learning. The platform publishes the guides he had to piece together himself — written for people who think in systems, not gardening metaphors.

Kai now runs three simultaneous grow systems (Kratky, DWC, and a small NFT channel) in a 400 sq ft apartment in Austin, TX. He documents every build, every failure, and every cost. If a setup cost $34 and produced 6 heads of lettuce in 28 days, that's what the guide says.