You’ve just stumbled into something brand new.
ReadTheManual isn’t another tech blog. It’s a launchpad for builders, tinkerers, and engineers who believe hands-on beats hypothetical every time, and who want their weekend projects to translate into a better Monday.
Whether you’re spinning up your first Raspberry Pi, testing Proxmox on an old laptop, or scripting your way toward a DevOps role, this space is for you.
🎯 Lab to Leader: What That Actually Means
The mantra running through everything we publish is Lab to Leader. It captures a specific belief: the homelab in your spare room is one of the most underrated career accelerators in tech, if you know how to translate it.
Most homelab content treats projects as toys. We treat them as training. The framework we use is what we call Ballet to Combat:
Homelab Project (Ballet) → Enterprise Skill (Combat) → Career Value (£££)
Some real examples:
- Proxmox VMs at home become VMware and Hyper-V virtualisation expertise, which translates into DevOps and platform roles in the £60k+ range.
- Kubernetes on a Raspberry Pi 5 cluster becomes enterprise AKS and EKS competence, which translates into Cloud Engineer roles at £70k+.
- Self-hosted Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, and a reverse proxy with TLS becomes production identity, secrets, and edge architecture, which translates into Solutions Architect roles at £80k+.
- n8n workflows automating your own life become enterprise orchestration and integration design, which translates into Automation Engineer roles at £65k+.
- An ELK or Wazuh stack in your homelab becomes production SOC tooling, which translates into Security Engineer and Analyst roles at £55k+.
The pattern is the same every time. Concepts you genuinely understand because you broke them at home become billable expertise in production. The interview answer goes from “I have read about Active Directory” to “I run a domain in my homelab, here is the forest trust I built last weekend.” Those two answers do not pay the same.
🚀 What Are We Doing Here?
ReadTheManual is being built as the resource we wished existed when we were climbing. That means:
- Homelab projects with a job in mind, not random builds for content
- Career-focused learning that goes beyond certifications, because passing AZ-104 and getting hired are not the same skill
- Cloud, automation, security, and self-hosted infrastructure covered from first principles through to production
- Honest costs and trade-offs, including the things that did not work and what we learned from them
If you are learning tech on your own terms in evenings, weekends, or dusty server racks in garages, you are in the right place.
💡 Why Now?
Because tech should not be locked behind a £15k bootcamp or a five-year degree path that nobody can afford to take while paying rent. Because you do not need permission to start building. And because we have watched far too many capable people stall out, not because they lacked ability, but because they could not see how to translate what they were already doing at home into the language of an enterprise interview.
That is not a skill problem. That is a translation problem. ReadTheManual exists to fix that.
You will not find gatekeeping here. You will find practical guides, real projects, and honest opinions of people actually running production infrastructure, written for the version of us that needed exactly this five years ago.
🔧 What’s Coming Next?
You are early. Day One. Over the coming weeks and months you will see:
- Build walkthroughs from budget rigs all the way through to enterprise-grade homelab racks
- Free resource guides covering cloud credits, toolkits, starter scripts, and reading lists
- Project ideas mapped to careers, so you know which Saturday afternoon spent on Kubernetes is paying you back the most
- Linux, networking, security, and Azure series taught the way we wished they had been taught to us
- A growing membership area for deeper collaboration as the community comes together
And yes, we are building a community. Not just a content feed. The most valuable part of any career move is usually the people who already made it, and we want this to be a place where those people show up.
👥 Who This Is For
If any of these questions sound familiar, you are exactly who we are writing for:
- “I passed AZ-900 but I still cannot get an interview. What is missing?”
- “How do I prove I know this stuff without three years of enterprise experience?”
- “Is this homelab project actually marketable, or am I just having fun?”
- “What should I learn next to bump my salary up?”
Those questions are not signs of being underqualified. They are signs of being mid-translation. We have been in those exact positions, and we know how to bridge them.
🙌 How to Get Involved
✅ Bookmark ReadTheManual.co.uk
✅ Follow ReadTheManual on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, and follow Eric on LinkedIn for behind-the-scenes commentary
✅ Sign up for the free RTM Tech Hub to get early access to walkthroughs, downloads, and projects (coming soon)
🧠 You do not need to know everything. You just need to start building, then learn how to point at it.
Welcome to the lab.
— The RTM Team
ReadTheManual is run, written and curated by Eric Lonsdale.
Eric has over 20 years of professional experience in IT infrastructure, cloud architecture, and cybersecurity, but started with PCs long before that.
He built his first machine from parts bought off tables at the local college campus, hoping they worked. He learned on BBC Micros and Atari units in the early 90s, and has built almost every PC he’s used between 1995 and now.
From helpdesk to infrastructure architect, Eric has worked across enterprise datacentres, Azure environments, and security operations. He’s managed teams, trained engineers, and spent two decades solving the problems this site teaches you to solve.
ReadTheManual exists because Eric believes the best way to learn IT is to build things, break things, and actually read the manual. Every guide on this site runs on infrastructure he owns and maintains.
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