I’ve been building computers since I was a teenager. Back then it was about having the fastest graphics card, the most RAM, the overclocked CPU. I built gaming rigs, took them apart, rebuilt them. I learned how operating systems worked by breaking them and fixing them again.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped building. Life got complicated. Work took over. The computers became tools rather than projects.
Now I’m returning to it — but differently.
Why a Homelab?
I have a need to understand systems. It’s not optional for me; it’s how my brain works. I need to see the connections, trace the paths, know how data flows from one point to another. Cloud services frustrate me because they’re black boxes. I put data in, something happens, data comes out. The middle is invisible.
A homelab is the opposite. Every piece is visible. Every connection is knowable. If something breaks, I can trace the failure through the network, through the hypervisor, down to the physical hardware. That visibility matters to me.
Also: I’m autistic. I don’t say that for sympathy or special consideration. I say it because it explains why this matters. I need systems I can predict. I need environments where I control the variables. The modern cloud ecosystem is chaos — constant changes, deprecated APIs, unexpected pricing changes. My homelab is my controlled environment.
What This Blog Will Cover
I’m not an expert. I want to be clear about that upfront. I’m learning as I go, and I’ll document both the successes and the failures. Here’s what I expect to write about:
Infrastructure: Proxmox virtualization, Ansible automation, Terraform for infrastructure-as-code. I’m building this to be repeatable and version-controlled. If my house burns down, I want to be able to recreate my entire setup from GitHub repositories.
Self-Hosting: Services I’m moving away from cloud providers — file storage, password management, communication tools, monitoring. The goal is reducing dependency on external services I don’t control.
The Learning Process: The mistakes, the wrong turns, the moments where I realize I’ve misunderstood something fundamental. These are often more valuable than the successes.
Tools and Workflows: What I’m using, why I chose it, what alternatives I considered. I’m trying to be intentional about every piece of the stack.
My Current Setup
For context, here’s where I’m starting:
- Router: GL-iNet GL-SFT1200 (OpenWrt-based)
- Virtualization Platform: Proxmox VE
- Automation: Ansible with Semaphore UI
- Configuration Management: Git-based, branch-protected, PR workflow
- Primary Goal: Self-host services currently using cloud/web platforms
This will evolve. I’m already planning network upgrades, additional compute nodes, storage expansion. The blog will evolve with it.
Who This Is For
Primarily: me. I’m writing this to solidify my own understanding. If you can teach it, you know it.
Secondarily: other people building homelabs, especially those who are neurodivergent and need systems that make sense to them. The standard documentation often assumes you already know things, or that you learn the way neurotypical people learn. I’ll try to be explicit about assumptions and explain things the way I needed them explained.
Finally: anyone who finds it useful. Maybe you’re considering a homelab. Maybe you’re trying to understand why someone would spend time and money on something they could get from AWS for $10/month. Maybe you’re just curious. All of those are valid reasons to be here.
The Format
I plan to post weekly on Mondays. Each post will be technical but accessible — I’ll explain terms when I use them, link to resources when I reference them, and provide enough context that you don’t need to already know everything to follow along.
I use Obsidian for writing, Hugo for the site, Cloudflare Pages for hosting. The entire workflow is Git-based. I may write about that setup in a future post.
Next Week
The first real technical post will cover my Proxmox setup — how I configured the virtualization platform, the network architecture I chose, and why I made those decisions. It won’t be a tutorial so much as a case study: this is what I did, these are the problems I encountered, this is how I solved them.
Thanks for reading. If you’re on a similar journey, I hope this is useful. If you’re ahead of me, I hope you’ll correct me when I’m wrong. That’s how I learn.
— Happific