The home server I finally stopped turning off
The most useful thing my home server taught me was not how to install another Docker container. It was how quickly a problem stops belonging to one tidy layer. A service can be running while DNS is wrong. Plex can work while the machine doing the transcoding cannot reach the storage. A reverse proxy can be configured correctly while the network around it is a mess. When it is your own server and you actually want to use it, those boundaries become your problem. That is very different from the way many application-focused software-engineering jobs feel. You can spend years building applications without having to join Linux, storage, DNS, HTTPS and networking together yourself. The experiments that kept getting turned off Around the start of 2020, I got a Raspberry Pi and repeatedly installed Raspbian or Debian on it. I would add Sonarr, Radarr, maybe Prowlarr, a torrent client and Plex. Sometimes Pi-hole joined them. There was no reverse proxy and I was not putting my own domains behind it. It was primitive, and I learnt something each time, but it never stuck, right? I would decide to play with it and eventually turn it off again. The Pi proved that I could run these services. It did not give me infrastructure I depended on. That changed in summer 2024. I had an old i5 desktop lying around, knew it worked and could connect drives to it easily. Why the hell not? I installed OpenMediaVault and spent the next two or three months building the setup out. Docker-managed services were joined by Traefik as a reverse proxy, Tailscale , proper DNS and network sharing. The useful result was a repeatable path for a new service. I could put it behind HTTPS and decide whether it should be public or only reachable inside my network. The machine was no longer an experiment waiting to be unplugged. A second machine made the lessons real I also bought a separate OptiPlex with 4 GB of RAM and installed Debian. Its main job was Plex Pass transcoding, reading media over the network from