I’m starting this blog because it could be a helpful way for me to share what I’m learning. Lately, I’ve felt a growing urge to document and keep track of my home lab adventures. Not because I have everything figured out, but because writing helps me think.
This blog is my public notebook. It’s a space for reflection and exploration. Hopefully, it is also useful for others walking a similar path.
Debugging My Thoughts
Some of my clearest ideas have come out of messy notes or long-form rambling in my Obsidian vault. Writing helps me organize my thoughts and spot gaps in my reasoning. When I write things down, I understand them more deeply. When I share them, I have to edit and make them clearer.
Earlier today, I wrote an explanation of how to properly license a UI library package in our CI/CD pipeline. I didn’t know how to do this at the beginning of the week, but the requirement to document it forced me to think about what was important for my coworkers and how to explain it clearly.
When I go on a trip, I like to make sketches of places and people I see along the way. It reminds me of the things I experienced and the people I met. I have similar feelings right now, writing this post.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve solved a problem in a clever way and then completely forgotten how I did it, or been stuck on frustrating code only to have a eureka moment while walking my dog.
Building Cool Things with Old Gear
I guess I’ve always been a bit of a cheapskate. I don’t usually like buying new stuff when a used or secondhand item will do just fine. It was fashionable for a while to do kintsugi workshops, where you break a plate or cup and glue it back together with gold and epoxy. I feel like that’s something I enjoy doing with computers and routers.
In my day job, the software almost always has to interact with legacy subsystems. Sometimes to pull data from one place, sometimes to process reports from another. I’d like to focus this blog on useful things I’ve built with secondhand equipment, and on software engineering challenges related to legacy systems.
I’ll show you my media server with GPU acceleration and DNS-level filtering using Pi-hole, just to name a few examples. This blog will dive into the details, explain how I got them working, and stand back and watch the smoke billow out the sides when things go wrong (hopefully only occasionally).
What to Expect
If you’re into self-hosting, home labs, Docker, reverse proxies, Raspberry Pis, and pushing old enterprise hardware to its limits, this blog might be right up your alley. I’ll share how I build things, what works, what doesn’t, and everything I learn along the way.
Thanks for stopping by. Let’s build cool things.