Why you should Homelab as a developer

There is a good chance you have heard, read or have been told by other developers that you should start your homelab. It does not need not be an expensive hobby. In fact, all it takes is one laptop. I have seen people like Jeff Geerling build and document amazing homelab setups and they have been my inspiration through this journey. In this post I explain how my homelab experience has been. Why I started, how it's going and lessons I have learned along the way and how they translate to my skillset. What I run on my homelab First let's get a quick overview of the things I run on my homelab. Personal website. A simple html/css/js site built with astro . Astro was very useful because I wanted something very lightweight to test out when I started. Jellyfin . A homelab is never complete without a personal media library. Jellyfin was the first big app I decided to run. I wanted to see how well the hardware could handle workloads like encoding and decoding media files. It is a pretty good stress test. Immich . I have been working to move away from google photos. Immich is a great open source alternative. With geotagging and machine learning to identify faces all running locally. And you can have multiple users with multiple accounts, this was a no brainer for me. Mailcow(currently exploring). While I have not entirely migrated off gmail, I am considering other self hosted mail providers. Tailscale . A Zero Trust identity-based connectivity platform. Honestly, the swiss army knife of homelabbing in my opinion. Pet projects. Whenever I have a new phoenix, rails or node application I need to test in a production environment, I usually build it and run it on my homelab. How it started. Well, like everything else, I wanted to practice my linux devops skills. Granted, I have been a linux user for about 8 years now, running a headless server was a new challenge for me. But I will admit, it has made me more confident that I will in fact figure it out if I do not know how something