Why?

Ah, the age old question... As human beings we get into the rhythm of doing certain things over and over. We go to the same coffee shops (for those who drink coffee), order the same meal, sit in the same seat on the train when possible. We like habit and consistency.

Don't worry this is not a philosophical rant on why we do the things we do. Rather, as I was thinking about writing about my current home lab setup, or what current technology I am learning about (CI/CD Pipeline). I thought to myself why not write about why I chose to study and dabble in these things even during my free time.

In the past few years I've been running a home lab on an old PC that I got from work. Currently it hosts 2 virtual machines, 3 Kubernetes clusters, and about 20 Docker containers. All contributing to the end goal of keeping my dear wife awake at night (The pc/server is in our bedroom... for the time being at least).

But all jokes aside, as I thought about the answer to this question two main reasons came to mind.

I love to learn. Messing around with a home lab and docker containers provides an endless possibilities to tinker and learn. Thanks to the vast amount of software provided by the Opensource community there is ample amount of things to learn and try out.

Not to mention as someone who works in IT, this technology has helped me greatly in being able to implement much of what I have learned in my current position.

I'm a cheapo. Yes I'll admit it. The thought of signing up for yet another subscription makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Because as we know once you sign up, it'll be months before you remember "Oh I have to cancel that". So my thought process is instead of subscribing to something I'll first self-host it instead. Previously I was hosting this very website on Pikapods, a reasonably priced hosting platform which I actually recommend. But why host something there when you can host something at home for mere price of Free99!

So if you have some free time, like to learn new things about Tech and fancy saving a few bucks when possible, sign up and stay tuned for future blogs.

I hope to write about what I'm currently working on as well as things I've found useful throughout the years.

Cheers,

Luis G