The wiki has a companion piece to this one, and it opens with basically the same question: why are you here? If you came from there, you already know the split — the wiki is steps, this is thoughts. This is where I stop documenting and start opining.
What actually shows up here
Less "here's how," more "here's what I think." Reflections on running my own infrastructure instead of renting someone else's. Opinions on tools, on the self-hosting-versus-cloud tradeoff, on whatever piece of tech I've been stubborn about lately. Sometimes it'll be a genuine hot take. Sometimes it'll just be me thinking out loud about a decision I made and whether it was actually a good one in hindsight.
If the wiki is the notes I took while doing something, this is the commentary track.
Why write opinions down at all
Because "Life in Tech" isn't just the config files and the uptime graphs — it's also the actual experience of doing this stuff. The satisfaction of a service finally routing correctly after a stubborn afternoon. The occasional realization that I over-engineered something for no good reason. The honest moments where a tool everyone loves just isn't clicking for me, and I'm not sure if that's a "them" problem or a "me" problem yet.
That's harder to fit into a walkthrough. It belongs here instead.
A fair warning
These are going to be opinions, not universal truths. I'm one person running one homelab, making decisions that make sense for my setup and probably wouldn't for yours. Take everything here as "this is what worked for me and why," not gospel.
Where to start
Nowhere in particular yet — this section grows as I actually have something worth saying, not on a schedule. If you want the practical stuff instead, that's what the wiki is for. If you're here for the "here's what I actually think," you're in the right place.