Career guidance for people building a life in IT infrastructure. Covers the interview questions that actually come up, how to talk about your homelab on a CV without looking like a hobbyist, which certifications are worth paying for versus which are recruiter bait, and how to move from helpdesk to sysadmin to architect without getting stuck. Written from 18 plus years across public sector, consultancy, MSPs, and independent work. The industry changes but the core progression does not. If you want an honest map of what skills to build, what roles to target, and which technology bets to make, this is where we keep it.
Take your vibe-coded app from Lovable to local development. Node.js setup, npm workflow, and making your first code changes.
From Cloud IDE to Local Dev: Set Up Your Development Environment Read More »
Learn vibe coding with Lovable and AI tools. Build a real application in 24 hours, export to GitHub, and own your code. No hustle porn, just practical skills.
Vibe Coding: Build a Working App in 24 Hours with AI Tools Read More »
Docker is the tool you’ll use most in any modern homelab. Almost every self-hosted service in 2026 ships as a container, and most of the tutorials on this blog assume you’ve got it installed and working. This post is the quick, reliable way to get Docker running on Debian 12, Debian 13 (trixie), Ubuntu 22.04
Install Docker on Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (2026) Read More »
Port forwarding is how we exposed home services to the internet ten years ago. Nobody should be doing it in 2026. The single best free upgrade you can make to a self-hosted setup right now is replacing every forwarded port with a Cloudflare Tunnel. This post is the complete step-by-step for getting a tunnel live
How to Set Up Cloudflare Tunnels on Debian (2026) Read More »
The hosting landscape has fundamentally changed in the last three years. If you last looked in 2022, you probably still think the choice is “shared hosting for a tenner a month, or a VPS if you’re technical.” In 2026 there are four realistic ways to put a website on the public internet, and the right
How to Host Your Own Website in 2026: Four Realistic Options Read More »
I posted on LinkedIn this week about building a homelab from e-waste. One laptop, zero pounds, a public webapp at the end. This is the technical write-up that the 3,000-character limit on LinkedIn couldn’t fit. If you want the short version of why, read the LinkedIn post. If you want the step-by-step of how a
Homelab From E-Waste: The Full Build Read More »
In Part 1, we covered the practical side: how to present your homelab on your CV, what to say in interviews, and which projects map to which roles. This is the bigger picture. Why it matters more now than it ever has. And why the engineers who keep building will be the ones who stay
The Training Pipeline Shut Off (But You Don’t Need Permission to Learn) Read More »
Your homelab is not a hobby. It is a professional development environment. I have been building, hiring into, and managing infrastructure teams for over 20 years. I have reviewed hundreds of CVs. The ones that stand out are not the ones with the longest list of certifications. They are the ones where the candidate has
Why Your Homelab Belongs on Your CV (And How to Present It) Read More »
83% of enterprises say they plan to bring workloads back from public cloud. Sovereign cloud spending is projected to hit $80 billion this year. The direction of travel is clear. But direction isn’t capability. I’ve spent 20 years building infrastructure – enterprise, cloud, and self-hosted. I architect Azure environments during the day and run my
The Cloud Exit Skillset: What Your Team Needs to Leave Read More »
K3s: Real Kubernetes on a Raspberry Pi Let me be honest upfront: running Kubernetes on a single Raspberry Pi is over-engineered. For running a few containers, Docker Compose is simpler, lighter, and more appropriate. If your goal is purely practical — get services running with minimum fuss — you don’t need Kubernetes. That’s not the
K3s: Real Kubernetes on a Raspberry Pi Read More »
