Homelab
Overview
The homelab is the proving ground.
It is where theory turns into something that can fail under my hands.
I do not chase uptime here, I chase insight.
Every service I deploy, every network I stitch together, every breakage I cause, it all serves one purpose: to learn in a way no book or video could ever give me.
This is not a datacenter.
It is not meant to impress with scale or hardware.
It is meant to expose me to the complexity of real systems, the tension between stability and change, and the truth that every configuration choice carries both benefits and risks.
Why I Build
I build this lab because control is not given, it is taken.
If I want to master systems, I need to run them, misconfigure them, repair them, and push them until they break.
I need a place where mistakes are safe, but lessons are sharp.
The homelab gives me that place.
It forces me to balance my two perspectives:
as the defender who needs resilience, and as the attacker who seeks the cracks.
Only by seeing both can I understand the full picture.
Design
I build modular.
Every piece should be able to stand alone, but also connect cleanly with others.
The network has firewalls, DNS, version control, and services I actually rely on daily.
I design them as if I were setting up the skeleton of a small company.
Because that is what most environments really are: small systems that grow, get patched, bent, and sometimes broken, until they turn into something much larger.
I want to see how that happens in my own hands.
Where it works.
Where it fails.
Where it reveals truths you cannot see on paper.
Questions
The lab is not just machines.
It is a diary of questions I keep returning to:
- What is worth building, and why?
- Which services actually create value, and which are noise?
- How do systems evolve as they scale, and where do they collapse?
These are not questions I expect to solve once.
They grow with the lab.
They grow with me.
And with every new system I add, they get sharper.