I believe that when more people understand technology, companies providing technology services will be held to a higher standard. So, in service of that, here’s my pitch to get you to start a homelab!

What is a Homelab?

At its core, a homelab is a safe place to experiment. With hardware, software, networking, and even dealing with angry users when your recipes app isn’t accessible and your significant other really needs the next step for that chili!

It can start out with totally 0 budget by using something like an old laptop, which is a homelab hack if ever I’ve seen one. You’ve likely already got it, it has a build in UPS (called a ‘battery’), a built in KVM (‘screen’ and ‘keyboard’) and if it’s actually an old laptop, a built in ethernet port. If not, a USB-to-Ethernet adapter will cost you as much as a cup of coffee so don’t freak out too much.

Learning Through Doing

One of the primary benefits of a homelab is hands-on learning. Reading documentation and tutorials is valuable, but you really need a place to follow along and cement that knowledge. Without that, you’re missing the 80% for the 20%.

My homelab has been an invaluable classroom where I’ve:

  • Discovered that YAML indentation errors are the bane of my existence
  • Learned why proper backups are essential after accidentally wiping a drive
  • Repeatedly assured myself that this time I’d document everything properly (still “WIP” if we’re being honest 😅)

All of these are things you definitely want to do to yourself before you do them to your FTSE100 Indexed employer. Just head to Google News and search for ‘misconfiguration’ or ‘glitch’ and you’ll see folks who would’ve benefited from a homelab.

Professional Growth

If you’re in the 🌟 tech world 🌟 at all, you know you have to keep your skills sharp. You might spend months on a project related to a niche skill you just happened to have from your uni days and then start to lose your muscle memory for working with more modern tech. This seems like an oddly specific point to make but it’s happened to me multiple times, in multiple different jobs.

Other than keeping your skills sharp, a homelab works as a public demonstration of your workmanship. Either make it public, or couple it with a blog (the infrastructure of which can also become a selling point), and you’ll already have a leg up in interviews over other candidates. I’ve had multiple job interviews that have started with “so, I read xyz on your blog.”

You don’t necessarily need to be twitter famous or anything (I’m definitely not). Just have something linked from the website in your CV or your LinkedIn for your potential boss to land on when pre-employment stalking you.

Creating Rather Than Consuming

One of my personal favourite aspect of a homelab is the transition from consumer to creator. Once you’ve been around long enough to see Google sunset a few of your favourite services (we still love you, Google Reader 🥲), you start looking for alternatives. These days, someone with a paid substack and a NextJS app they had AI write for them will probably suggest that they can teach you how, but I can promise you that unless you want to deploy it to Vercel’s cloud you need another way.

You don’t have to build it from scratch either, there’s plenty of open source apps that you can spin up to replace these services, you just need a place to deploy them. That could be a $5/m VPS from someone like Linode, which is great to start out with, but you inevitably hit an issue with storage or networking or memory and then things get expensive fast. An upgrade to your homelab that you could make yourself which costs you $20 will cost you that per month with some VPS providers.

There is a special satisfaction about being able to say “oh yeah, I can just run that for you” when a friend complains about the cost of extra iCloud storage.

Some Tips on Starting Your Own Homelab Journey

If I’ve done my job and you’re inspired to start your own homelab journey, here are some quick points to keep in mind:

  • Start small and set interesting goals that you can achieve quickly - there’ll be a future post on ideal homelab projects for beginners but for now check out Homepage, Mealie, or Linkding.
  • Practice documenting everything to find your preferred style and have reasons for your opinion - being able to articulate these when collaborating with teams in the future makes you look like you know what you’re doing, and then everyone does things your way!
  • Join communities like r/homelab, r/selfhosted, or The Level1 Forum and READ FIRST - the worst thing to do is go blasting away in forums where you don’t know the etiquette and your question has been solved 12 times already

As you start to figure out your preferred way of doing certain things, remember the phrase “strong opinions, loosely held.” You should have reasons for your views, but if new evidence presents itself then you should be humble enough to take that on board and re-evaluate.

*Have you started your homelab journey? Do you have ‘where do I go from here’ type questions? I’d love to nerd out or give you encouragement, shoot me a message on Mastodon!