Motivation
Why build a home lab when cloud services exist for everything?
The Skills Were There
After a year at SAP since Jun 2025, I’d picked up a solid foundation in infra, deployments, and CI/CD pipelines. At some point it clicked — I actually know enough to do this myself. Not just follow tutorials, but design something real and own it end to end.
2026 also happened to be the year AI-assisted development exploded. Vibe-coding with Gemini made it genuinely feasible to move fast on ambitious side projects without getting bogged down. p.s. this was entirely vibe-coded with Gemini… but understanding the code is still a given!
The Problem With “Just Use The Cloud”
Using cloud services for everything means:
- No ownership — data lives on someone else’s servers
- Recurring costs — subscriptions add up fast
- No learning — someone else manages the hard parts
I wanted to actually understand how things work at the infra level. DNS, tunnels, storage replication, sync protocols — the stuff that’s usually abstracted away.
What I Actually Wanted
- A personal knowledge base (Obsidian) that syncs across all devices without relying on Obsidian Sync (paid)
- A public blog (garden.iujinwee.cc) that publishes automatically from my vault
- A portfolio site I host myself, not on some managed platform
- Custom email on my own domain
- All of it accessible remotely, securely, without opening ports on my home network
The NAS with CouchDB handles vault sync. Cloudflare tunnels handle secure external access. TailScale handles the VPN mesh for when I need direct access. Each piece solves a specific problem.
Why Not Just Buy A Mac Mini?
Tentatively, the home lab runs on the NAS alone — no dedicated compute node yet. The NAS handles storage and runs CouchDB for Obsidian LiveSync. Services that need more compute go elsewhere for now.
Whether a Mac Mini gets added later depends on what I actually need. No point adding hardware for hardware’s sake.
Looking forward to reviewing my own work in the future 👀🥂