When Your Home Lab Doubles in Size: Rethinking Dashboard UI for 22 Nodes

After expanding a home lab cluster from 12 to 22 nodes overnight, the existing SPA dashboard built on Flask + Vanilla JS hit its design limits. The author explores three UI scaling strategies — role-based grouping, display density toggles, and incremental search/filter — along with backend considerations like async loading and cache TTL to handle growing node counts without a full rewrite.