Welcome to my humble blog! 👋 I write technical posts with the intention of either documenting problems I have solved or showing off stuff I built.

My passion is self-hosting in my home lab with these important goals:

• Data sovereignty, privacy and autonomy: Nowadays our data is increasingly in the hands of companies. This is problematic because these companies have but one goal: to make money, oftentimes using the data you entrust them. Worse still, these companies are not scared of barring you from your own data (see this link for example). These facts have made it abundantly clear we need to have full control over our own data.
• Expanding knowledge for my professional life: Diving into new technologies without the risk of breaking important systems is in my opinion one of the best methods to learn. Actually, breaking things is the best way to learn! Stuff breaks (usually) because you don’t fully understand it, and these failures are therefore very valuable.
• Fun: 😀

How did I get here?

I started out with an interest in programming during high school. I was quick to realize, M$ Windows is terrible for any form of serious development and decided to dual-boot Linux for this. Over time, I realized I was only using Windows for gaming and ditched it all together.

In the meantime, I distrohopped quite a bit (like any starting Linux user 😀). Some distros I tried in the past (and what I can remember): Ubuntu, Zorin OS, Kubuntu, MX Linux, Xubuntu, Debian, PopOS, Linux Mint. I guess I was quite the Apt fan?

In my time at university, while trying to host a personal website, I came in contact with Docker. This started my descent in the realm of system administration, DevOps and Infrastucture as Code: I acquired a Celeton-powered Gigabyte Brix mini PC to run Docker on. Over time, I went from hosting just my personal website to hosting a wide arsenal of services, and added two more mini PCs to my server fleet. This was all hosted using Docker Compose, but I found this difficult to manage over multiple hosts. I found more flexibility in Docker Swarm, giving me poor man’s clustering capabilities. See this post where I made a detailed write-up of the state of my home lab back then.

And where am I now? You’ll have to take a look over at the /now page and my other posts!