Stephen Downes

I have the feeling Ian O'Byrne may conclude by the end of his series that this approach isn't the best way to manage your online presence, but that said, running a 'homelab' from scratch is no doubt going to teach him a ton about the tools we use. "At its simplest, a homelab is just a personal computing environment you control. It might be an old desktop running Linux in a corner, a tiny Raspberry Pi serving your files, or a small server rack quietly humming in the basement. It's a space where you can experiment, break things, fix them, and learn how digital systems actually work." As he sets up his self-hosting environment, he'll learn about the real issues developers face. "Ultimately, this isn't just about technology. It's about understanding the systems that shape us, and imagining how we might shape them in return."