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5d (edited) • 💬 General discussion
So you have a home lab. Now what?
One of the questions I get often is: so I built my home lab. What do I do with it?
And it’s one of my favorite questions to answer.
Every week I host several live Q&A calls in KubeCraft.
And this question comes up regularly.
During these mentorship sessions, I teach my students a process that you won't find anywhere else.
So instead of just giving you a list of apps to run, I’ll share my whole thought process so you can decide for yourself.
I think that will serve you better than a list of apps.
But before we jump in, I should let you know that I'm only accepting 10 new students in December.
I'll help you land a remote, 6-figure DevOps job so you can live the life of your dreams.
What is a home lab anyway?
First of all, let’s think about what a home lab is.
One big misconception people have is that home labs need to be big server racks with thousands of dollars of equipment.
They think you need to run 5 node Kubernetes clusters before you can even call it a home lab.
This is completely false.
My home lab started with a ThinkPad T430. An old laptop that was gathering dust in a closet.
I installed Linux on there, and ran Linkding in a Docker container.
I was so proud. I had my own little application that I could run.
I was self-hosting. And it all started from there.
Solve Problems You Already Have
When I get the question, “what should I run?”, my first reaction is always to solve problems you already have in your life.
The reason why I ended up self-hosting Linkding was because I was switching browsers so often.
I would sometimes have three different browsers running.
One on my phone, one on my laptop, and one on my main workstation.
I needed a place to store my bookmarks that was independent of the browser.
And after using Raindrop for a while, I somehow discovered Linkding.
I’ve been using it for over 3 years now.
So here’s what I encourage you to do:
Try to think of something that you find yourself doing repeatedly.
A chore that keeps coming back and that you don’t like doing.
Then find a way to automate that.
For example, you can automate the dimming of lights using Home Assistant.
One friend of mine scrapes the current prices of power, and calculates whether he should run his laundry machine in the morning or in the evening.
Everybody has different problems. So I can't tell you which one to pick.
But here's one of the main problems I fixed for myself:
Storing Data
The second main use-case I have for my own home lab is to store data.
I’m a fond user of all sorts of tracking devices.
I use both WHOOP and and Oura ring to track my sleep and other health metrics.
I track all the calories I eat in in Macrofactor.
(Though I am not perfect and I do have weeks where I slack on this)
I also weigh myself every morning.
All of these devices are generating data that’s being stored by other companies.
I can access the data from their portals and apps, but I don’t really own that data.
This was bothering me to no end, so I decided to create my own services that extract the data from these applications and store them in my own databases.
I had a problem that I wanted to solve.
But one other thing that plays a role in my home lab decision making process is whether something has relevance for my development as an engineer.
At the time I was working for a company that used the EDB Operator to run Postgres databases on Kubernetes.
I wanted to learn more about Kubernetes database operations.
I decided to combine my desire to store my tracker data with my interest in running databases and interacting with them from code.
After a weekend of tinkering I had a scraper that would grab all of my Oura data and store it in a postgres database.
And the best part was that I could visualize it with Grafana dashboards!
As a side note, I actually used to do this from my self-hosted n8n instance, but Oura recently made a change.
They won’t allow you to authenticate with PAT tokens anymore, so I had to create a new applications that authorizes with an Oauth2 flow.
If you’re interested you can view the source code here:
The Goal
The main goal of the home lab is to have a place where you can experiment and develop yourself.
But to what end do you do this? Is it only for fun?
I already alluded to it earlier in this newsletter, but the home lab is much more than a place to learn tech.
It’s your personal portfolio to land remote 6 figure DevOps jobs.
Because that’s why you’re here right?
You want to work where you want, with the people you want, on the people you want.
The home lab is what hundreds of my students have done to land these kinds of jobs.
Some times within a couple of weeks!
When you join KubeCraft, you get a complete system that will teach you to become a DevOps engineer from scratch.
One of these systems is called Homelab OS.
This is an extremely deep course that will take you from zero Kubernetes knowledge to building a public homelab that acts as an irresistible portfolio project.
Home labs are fun, and a great hobby to practice.
But if you want a remote 6-figure DevOps job, you have to stop playing around and start taking action.
CLICK HERE to get access to Homelab OS and to start making $171K+ a year.
Take the teachings from this newsletter and use them to find home lab use cases that make your life better.
It is the most satisfying hobby I have ever started, and I’m not going to stop any time soon.
Keep striving for that remote job and complete autonomy,
Mischa
P.S. We are only accepting 10 students for the December cohort. CLICK HERE to claim your spot before they run out.
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So you have a home lab. Now what?
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