How Homelabs Rekindled My Love for Tinkering and Learning

I have always been a visual learner. Give me a wall of text to read through and I will give up halfway. But show me something I can see, touch, and interact with, something I can break and fix, and every synapse in my brain starts firing at once.

This was painfully obvious in secondary school. I excelled in Biology and Literature, subjects rich with diagrams, stories, and things I could visualise. In Maths and Physics? A terrible student. I am still a little embarrassed about it.

Learning by Doing

When I wanted to get into computing, I quickly discovered that traditional classroom learning was not going to work for me. I had to learn on real projects.

As a kid, my dad enrolled us in a class to learn MS-DOS, this is way back. Everything taught went in one ear and out the other. The first thing I ever truly learned in computing came differently: someone needed a website built in 2002. I had zero knowledge of HTML or web design, but I volunteered anyway. Told the man I could deliver it easily and handed him an invoice.

Then I went to Otigba (Computer Village), assembled a desktop computer, bought a Dreamweaver CD, and taught myself web design using the actual project I had already been paid for. From that point on, web design became a genuine income generator for me for well over a decade.

No project, no progress. That is simply how my brain is wired, and I have stopped apologising for it.

The Ruby on Rails Chapter

The same pattern repeated when I picked up my first programming language. I volunteered to build a car listing platform (think Cars.com) and used that project to learn Ruby on Rails from scratch. I shipped several projects with it before PHP frameworks matured and became the de facto standard for web apps.

I tried to transition to CakePHP in its early days. But without a real project to anchor the learning, I abandoned it quickly. No project, no progress. That is simply how my brain is wired, and I have stopped apologising for it.

Drifting Away

As my career progressed, I gradually drifted away from programming and learning new development concepts. I always had one or two engineers working alongside me who would handle the code, whatever was needed to deliver the project.

I missed the tinkering days. The ones where I would disappear down a rabbit hole learning something entirely new while building something real. That feeling of discovery, of being genuinely lost in a new domain, is hard to replicate once you have had it.

A Dinner That Changed Everything

Sometime in 2022, during a work dinner with colleagues at Orda, I found myself in conversation with Matteo Cuella, someone I had worked with across multiple companies at this point. He showed me how he had set up Home Assistant in his home in the UK, self-hosting the entire service on a Raspberry Pi without paying for any commercial home automation service.

It looked genuinely impressive. My interest was piqued.

Back at the hotel that night, I started investigating Home Assistant. One link led to another, and I fell headfirst into the world of Homelabs: YouTube videos, Reddit threads, self-hosting operating systems, hardware specifications. I disappeared completely into the abyss.

It felt exactly like being back in university, about to start a website project knowing absolutely nothing about web development. All that new information flooding in at once about a domain you are only just discovering. Exhilarating is the only word for it. I did not sleep until 5am.

The next morning, I reached out to my wife to let her know I was about to spend some money. Married people know this hack.

Building the Lab

The next day I was on Newegg, shopping for hardware components. I watched about ten YouTube videos before settling on a NAS case alone. Researching different components, comparing costs and value, determining which hardware would work with the use cases I had in mind. It was genuinely fun in a way I had almost forgotten work could be.

I was also scheduled to spend a week in Chicago on that same trip, so for the components I was not sure about, I visited Micro Center in person. The prospect of assembling everything myself once I was back in Lagos filled me with a kind of joy I had not felt in years.

Three Years In and Still Going

My Homelab has been running for three years now. I tinker with it constantly and learn something new almost every day. It has brought me back to writing code, something I had not done seriously in years.

A year ago, I set up OPNsense on a box I bought from AliExpress. That single project taught me more about computer networking than anything else in my entire career. I could see firsthand how far things have come since my days working in a cybercafé, but that is a story for another post.

The specs below are what I am currently running. It never really ends, though. I have added quite a few things since I first assembled it, and the wishlist only keeps growing.

Current Homelab Specs

If you are reading this and you have been putting off setting up a Homelab because it feels too technical, start anyway. The not-knowing is the best part.