My personal hub: served from my desk

This website doesn’t live in a data center. It lives in a corner of my desk, because I enjoy building my own tools.

Right next to me are two Raspberry Pi 5s connected to a 4 TB drive, serving as the home for nearly all of my personal projects: this website, experiments, APIs, small services, and just about any idea that eventually turns into something useful.

Yes, the trays are out of order. Every time I look at them, I tell myself I’ll organize them someday. That day hasn’t come yet.

I could have rented a VPS and forgotten about all of this. It would certainly have been easier, but I never built this to save money. I built it because the journey interested me just as much as the destination.

I enjoy understanding how things work. I wanted to learn about Linux, networking, Docker, automation, backups, monitoring, and deployments. Running my own infrastructure forces me to deal with real-world problems that I’d probably never encounter if all I had to do was click a button on a cloud provider.

Over time, I discovered another unexpected benefit: when everything depends on you, you also gain a much better sense of what can be automated. Today, I delegate many of those routine tasks to AI tools. Updates, repetitive work, small configuration issues, or scripts that used to take me a while can now often be solved in minutes. That gives me more time to build projects and less time maintaining them.

I don’t see this little home rack as a replacement for the cloud. For many projects, a cloud provider is probably still the best choice. I simply enjoy building my own lab.

Every new project starts there. Sometimes it becomes an API, sometimes a scraper, sometimes an AI model, or simply an idea I wanted to explore. Having my infrastructure at home lets me experiment without too many barriers, and as long as I still have room under my desk, it’ll probably keep growing.

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I like to think that every time someone visits this website, one of those Raspberry Pis wakes up for a few milliseconds to respond. It’s a simple idea, but it makes the Internet feel a little more personal.