My homelab started as a way to keep old hardware out of the e-waste pile. I had a motherboard, CPU, RAM, a cooler and some drives sitting around. I bought a case and the odds and ends, and figured I might as well make it a server.
I've always wanted a server for media and storage. As an adult, realizing I could drop subscriptions in favor of something sitting in my living room was the push. I've loved every second of tinkering, even the frustrating parts. It's such a pure form of problem solving, and it scratches a very particular part of my brain.
Everything is written down in two git repositories: what runs right now, and the projects in progress. Every change gets a dated changelog line. A job scheduler runs the nightly backups and a set of checks that tell me in the morning if anything drifted from what the docs say.
I also work with AI coding agents on it. They follow written rules with tiers of permission, ask before touching anything that's running, and log what they did.
Marketing at a small company is half systems: the site, the store, the tracking, the email platform. The homelab is where I practice keeping systems honest, and it's why the tracking audit felt natural.