I'd rather build it than read the spec sheet.

It started the way it starts for a lot of people — a computer that didn't work and nobody around to fix it. Taking that one apart turned into building them, which turned into wondering what the box the internet came out of was actually doing.

That question is what led to the homelab. Instead of renting services from companies I'd never meet, I wanted to run them myself: photo backup, media, a game server, a website. Every one of those taught me something I could only have learned by breaking it first.

I'm heading into a networking role with the Air National Guard, so the lab does double duty — it's a place to practice with real gear before it counts, and a record of the fact that I did.

The blog is the part I care most about. Anyone can list hardware. The interesting part is the Postgres extension that wouldn't load, the dev server stuck in a crash loop, the transfer packet that meant the address had to be publicly reachable. That's the actual work.