Stay home.
Run your own stuff.

I got into tech the way a lot of people do: building things because I needed them, not because I had a plan. What kept me here is that you can run a lot of it yourself, on your own terms, instead of renting everything from someone else.

Self-hosting

Everything in the homelab chapter runs on a machine in my house. I can SSH into it, look at the logs, and see exactly what it’s doing. It’s not a scalability strategy. I just like understanding the systems I depend on.

Managed platforms are convenient until they aren’t. Costs spike, APIs change, companies fold. Running things myself means I actually learn how they work, and I’m not stuck when someone else changes the deal.

Open source

Nothing I’ve built is novel. Every project here is built on things other people gave away: Linux, Docker, Postgres, Next.js. I try to give back where I can, by open-sourcing what’s mine to open-source, reporting bugs upstream, and writing up what I learned so the next person doesn’t lose three hours to the same problem.

It’s less a political thing for me than a practical one. Software you can read and change is software you actually control.

Craft

I care about the quality of what I build, but not in a way that stops me shipping. It’s more the “would I be embarrassed to show someone this in a year” test. Mostly that means writing code the next person, usually future-me, can actually follow.

The solarpunk look of this site isn’t just decoration. I like technology that’s understandable and a bit hopeful, rather than opaque and extractive.

“The most radical thing we can do is stay home.”

- adrienne maree brown

For me it’s about more than geography: build your own things, run them yourself, and stay close to how they work.