First Blog

Published on December 17, 2025

tl;dr

Self-host OSS software tutorials are coming

Where to begin

I have spent the last five years as a DevOps engineer. Before that, I was an educator for ten years. Recently I was posed with the question, “What are you passionate about?”

Now this type of question always leaves a bad taste in my mouth because I believe the word “passion” is overused. Word choice aside, I spent some time considering this question. Of course, there are the answers that do and should come first. God, my Catholic Faith, and Family are passions of mine. However, the goal of the question and now, my cognitive exercise, was to determine an interest. I needed to determine a subject that is interesting to me in a way that I could talk about for dozens of blog posts, or a subject that I was willing and excited about educating my audience on. Though a bit dated now, the book “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk, outlined the idea well. If you have something you’re “passionate” about and can spend countless hours talking about, then you can monetize it. Monetizing is a goal, perhaps, but mostly, I want to talk about this thing that I love, and I think, there are others out there that would love it, too.

So, what is this thing that I can’t stop talking about even though it annoys, frustrates, or bores those around me (but hopefully will envigore, excite, and motivate)? I am in fact “passionate” about self-hosting and automating software. I especially enjoy running open source software (OSS). And in a world where we are moving faster and faster to pay for software with our personal data and montly subscriptions, I believe there is an opportunity, still, to educate the world in a way that demonstrates your own ability to continue owning your data, and choosing the tools you use with intent to minimize your technological footprint.

Where did it begin?

This all began around twelve years ago when I wanted to play a game with friends over the internet. At the time, running your own game server over the internet was a bit of a commodity and a mostly novel idea for the average gamer. There were other options of course. My friends and I could have played this game on a public server or we could have rented a server for a monthly fee to play privately with each other. However, I had learned that it was possible to host your own server on simple old hardware, and I began messing with headless Linux servers, the TCP/IP tech stack and home networking. I do not spend much time playing games anymore, but this experience led to what is now my profession, and I still spend time weekly self-hosting my own home cloud that runs services for me and my family to use daily.

What’s this to you?

I want you all, should you want to host your own personal services, like a password manager, vpn, or media server, to have the opportunity and as low a barrier to entry as possible. Some tech enthusiasts and tech educators have already done great work in this space, but I believe the more we can bring abilities to the average home, the more we can give people a choice as to where they want their data and money to go. If there’s one thing that is certain to me, moving forward, it is that we do not need more monopolies on services that we use on a day-to-day basis, but rather, we need to continue to support diversifying the choices people have when it comes to how they spend their time in the digital world.

Goals

My goal over time, is to put together tutorials and information on enough OSS projects and self-hosting automations, that it is possible for someone from the general public to self-host the services they need and want.

Who might that be?

• Someone who has a tenacity for learning and wants to establish a homelab
• Someone who wants to protect themselves from the data scraping of cloud services
• Someone who wants to save themselves the cost of cloud services
• Someone who just likes the idea of reusing old hardware instead of throwing out
• Someone who likes to tinker with tech
• Or a combination of any of the above descriptions.

I want to build a community of people who want to and are able to manage their own home cloud or home lab, empowering them to own their own data and understand more of how the digital world around them works.