The Homelab That Made My Career

I’ve told the “homelab made my career” story plenty of times. I’ve told it to junior colleagues, I’ve referenced it in previous episodes, I’ve told it to anyone who’d listen, really. But I’ve always told it from my side of the desk, the learning, the certifications, the late nights rebuilding broken clusters and figuring out what went wrong. What I’ve never done is hand the mic to the person who’s actually had to live with it all. My wife, is back on the podcast, she joined me for episode five’s parenting conversation, and this time we’re talking about the homelab. What it’s been like sharing a house with near-production-grade networking gear, what’s genuinely driven her up the wall over the years, and whether, after all the dollars and weekends spent on it, the whole thing has actually been worth it. For both of us.

What It’s Actually Like Sharing a House With a Rack

The honest answer, according to Tavani, is “interesting — and very frustrating sometimes.”

Our setup isn’t the full “server cabinet in the garage” situation. I deliberately went the other direction, four Intel NUC mini PCs, a QNAP NAS, and some networking gear sitting in a little rack tucked into the linen cupboard. Wife-approved lab, as the saying goes among those of us who run this stuff at home. But even a compact setup comes with its own particular flavour of domestic friction. The cupboard door has to stay open or the temperature spikes. The sides and lids of things end up propped around the place rather than sitting neatly on the equipment where they belong. And when the power goes out, someone has to know the boot order, which, to Tavani’s credit, she genuinely does now. I’ve taught her how everything fits in the rack and what comes up first. She hates it, but she knows it.

The lab started long before our current setup, of course. Fifteen years back it was an old gaming PC I’d repurposed once I upgraded. Then a Dell PowerEdge under the desk in the old house, a full tower that drew an obscene amount of power and sounded like it was trying to take off. That got retired pretty quickly when the electricity bill made its feelings known. The NUC setup was the deliberate scale-back, smaller footprint, quieter, more practical for a home that’s also, you know, a home. And it does the job. It does more than the job, honestly.

What Tavani pointed out, and she’s right is right by the way (Dont tell her I said that) is that I used to spend a lot more time on it than I do now. Back in the early days it was constant: build something, break it, rebuild it, break it differently, figure out why. These days the core infrastructure is largely stable and I’m not tearing it down every weekend. A kid somewhere in the middle of that timeline probably helped. Hard to spend six hours rebuilding a cluster when there’s a five-year-old who has opinions about what you should be doing instead.

The Ad Blocker Situation

Right, so. If there’s one thing that has caused the most genuine, legitimate frustration in our house — it’s the ad blocking setup being a bit too enthusiastic.

We run network-wide ad blocking, which is genuinely great. Tavani’s sister loves coming over and connecting to the guest network because she can play games without sitting through ads. Our son isn’t at the Googling age yet, but when he gets there, having that layer of filtering in place is going to matter. The problem is that “blocks ads” and “blocks things that apps need to function” are sometimes uncomfortably close to the same thing. Woolworths — yes, the grocery app — would grind to a halt because certain trackers it apparently requires were getting caught in the filter. So Tavani would have to walk to a specific corner of the house, switch off Wi-Fi, drop to 5G, and do the grocery order from there. That is not a great user experience for someone who just wants to sort out the shopping.

Paramount was another one — wouldn’t load on our son’s iPad at all. We spent a while assuming it was a Paramount problem. After some investigation, it was the ad blocking being too strict. Had to go through and whitelist certain things, or whitelist specific devices, to get it working again. The Woolworths issue got a similar treatment. You go in, you tune it, you try to find the balance between “actually blocking the bad stuff” and “not making my wife do laps of the house to buy milk.”

The network segmentation situation has been its own ongoing saga as well. We run a main network and a separate IoT network, the idea being that devices I don’t control at the OS level, things like the TV, the PlayStation, smart home gear, sit on an untrusted network where they can do whatever they want without touching anything I actually care about. Conceptually correct. In practice, it meant that casting something from a phone to the TV required switching networks manually. Which meant my wife, trying to put a workout video on the TV, would have to disconnect from one network, reconnect to the other, cast the video, and then wonder why we made life so much harder than it needed to be. That one’s on me, I knew it was annoying, I kept meaning to fix it, and instead she just worked around it. The firewall rules that would have solved it properly kept getting bumped down the priority list.

Not my finest hour as the self proclaimed network administrator for Atkinson Networks.

The Apple HomePod situation deserves an honourable mention. We moved away from Google Home and went all-in on Apple phones, HomePod, the lot, and connecting it cleanly across our network segments has been, to put it diplomatically, a project. One Tavani is not thrilled about.

Why I Kept Building It Anyway

Here’s the thing I always tell junior people when they ask about homelabs: you’re not going to learn this stuff at work. You’re not going to test things in production. You’re absolutely not going to test things in a customer’s environment, god forbid. The lab is the only place where you can actually get your hands dirty without consequences that matter.

My career progression has been across a lot of different disciplines, backups, virtualisation, infrastructure, and increasingly networking and security work. I’m not a network engineer by background. That was never my speciality. But the lab forced me into it, because if you’re running your own near-production network at home, you have to understand what it’s doing. You have to think about segmentation and security and why zero trust matters — even if the thing you’re protecting is your son’s iPad and your wife’s grocery app. That understanding carried directly into work. Into customer conversations. Into standing in front of people and actually knowing what you’re talking about rather than having only read about it.

My wife made a point during the episode that stuck with me, early on in my current role, when the work lab was constrained and everyone was fighting for access to it, I could just use mine. I could replicate a customer’s infrastructure at home, test the thing we were proposing, break it on purpose, figure out where the edges were, and then walk into that customer conversation with genuine confidence because I’d already done it. That’s the value of the lab, right there. Not the gear but the freedom to be wrong in private.

Pretty hard to put a dollar figure on that.

Was It Worth It

I’ve spent somewhere around four to five thousand dollars on this lab over the years. That covers the NUCs, the NAS, networking gear, the Cisco Meraki kit I picked up when doing certifications, and then the move to Ubiquiti Unifi gear more recently. There have been licences along the way and the subscription model that comes with some of this stuff is genuinely an ongoing cost that adds up. That was actually part of why we switched platforms at one point; the subscription cost on one piece of kit just stopped making sense.

So. Four to five grand, spread across a number of years. Was it worth it?

From my perspective without a doubt, absolutely, without any hesitation. The number of times that lab has been the direct reason I could do my job well is genuinely hard to count. Exam prep, customer project replication, learning new tools, understanding how things break and how to get them back up again. I learn by doing. Reading a textbook tells me something. Building it, destroying it, and rebuilding it from memory makes it stick. That’s just how my brain works, and the lab gave me the place to do that without risk.

My wifes’s take is more measured, and honestly it’s the more interesting perspective. She said, and I think this is the most honest thing either of us has said on mic — that she wouldn’t have known any better. If we’d just had a mesh router like a normal household, she’d have had a fine network experience and no idea what she was missing. So from her side, the question of whether it was “worth it” is kind of unanswerable. What she does see is the career trajectory, the progression, the fact that I can walk into any conversation about infrastructure with actual knowledge rather than theoretical familiarity. She sees that it helped. She also sees the Woolworths corner-of-the-house-3G workaround, the open cupboard door, and the access point that’s been sitting on her office desk for six months waiting to be ceiling-mounted.

I paid for the lab with money. My Wife paid for it in patience — the ad blocking tuning sessions, the network switch-overs, the boot-order memorisation, the years of random hard drives arriving in the post and the very reasonable question of “what even is this.” I don’t think I’ve ever properly said that on mic before. The lab made my career, and she made the lab liveable. That’s the full story, and it only took six episodes to tell it properly.

Thanks for listening — as always, keep on learning.