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I am currently a Senior Platform Engineer. I enjoy working with the latest technology in my homelab.
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Homelab History
My "lab" began with the first model Raspberry Pi while I was in school. I made a version of the classic game Snake in Java, compiled it into a jar, and put it on the Pi with an Apache web server so I could download it on other machines. Then I set up a proxy tunnel to my network so I could access it from anywhere.
That got me hooked on networking and self-hosting. I set up an Ubuntu NAS with SMB and moved
everything off the Pi. In school we used Java until the end when I had a web dev class that
was all ASP.NET. My first full-stack app was a meal preparation app with a database of
recipes that was my final capstone project at university. That was also one of the first
projects where I used
git to collaborate with other people.
My first job in tech was a mix of Windows AD infrastructure and a large fleet of Linux machines for HPC. I set up a home lab on a Dell PowerEdge R610 with ESXi and Windows VMs for an Active Directory lab. My second job was all Linux, and every one after has been too. Around 2018 I switched to Proxmox hypervisors and TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) for storage. Later jobs centered on Kubernetes app deployment, so the lab followed with Ubuntu VMs running k8s clusters.
Today the setup includes:
- UniFi UDM Pro with cameras and switches
- Synology NAS (12 TB) + backup NAS (4 TB)
- 4 Proxmox servers
- 5 Raspberry Pis
- Linux server with Nvidia GPU
- M4 Mac mini
This uses a lot of power and I would likely not have this many servers without solar to offset the cost. I use Wireguard for remote access and a password manager for credentials.