Lab
Experiments & Build Notes
Practical experiments in infrastructure, AI, self-hosting, and systems engineering. Not polished guides — honest notes on what I built, what broke, and what I learned.
The Lab is where I test things on hardware I own, at a scale where being wrong is cheap. A single gaming laptop running Proxmox, a Kubernetes cluster with no cloud provider underneath it, local language models on a consumer GPU. None of it is production. All of it changes how I read a managed service afterwards.
It exists because the fastest way to understand what a cloud provider is actually doing for you is to do it yourself once, badly, and count what breaks. Every note here says what I built, what it cost, what surprised me, and what I had to accept — including the parts I would not repeat.
Looking for the professional work instead? Client engagements live in case studies, and the architecture arguments behind them in insights.
Replacing Google Photos with Immich
After years of Google Photos, I migrated my entire photo library to a self-hosted Immich instance. The migration took a weekend. The result is faster, more private, and — surprisingly — more capable for browsing.
Private AI at Home with Ollama + Open WebUI
Running large language models locally means your prompts never leave your machine. Here's how I set up Ollama and Open WebUI on my home lab, what models I use daily, and where the limits are.
Why I Built a Home Lab on a Gaming Laptop
Running Proxmox on a gaming laptop turns out to be a surprisingly capable home lab setup — enough CPU, ECC-free RAM that doesn't matter for learning, and a screen attached. Here's why I did it and what I learned.