Homelab

Hello, World: Life, Logged

Twenty-plus years of building things, and almost none of it written down. Here's why that changes now, what's coming, and the one thing I'm holding back.

J. Goode · Sep 28, 2026 · 2 min read

I've been building things for a long time. I have not been writing them down for nearly as long — and that's a problem.

My homelab has grown into something I'm genuinely proud of: servers on two continents, a mesh network holding it all together, a dozen AI agents keeping watch, and more self-built apps than I can name without checking. Almost none of it exists anywhere outside my own git server and my own head. The knowledge lives in terminal history and late-night chat logs.

This blog is me fixing that.

Why now

Honestly? I've always been uneasy putting my work in public. Twenty-plus years in IT, a lot of it around security, gives you a healthy instinct to keep your infrastructure to yourself. Posting how your network is built feels a lot like leaving the blueprints taped to the front door.

But I've come to think the instinct is right about details and wrong about ideas. The interesting part of what I've built isn't which hostname runs which service. It's the decisions: why a DNS server must never trust its own DNS, why a security agent shouldn't be able to SSH anywhere, why you run two of anything everything else depends on. Those are worth sharing, and none of them need a map.

So here's the deal I've made with myself: share the thinking, the code and the mistakes. Keep the addresses.

🔒

You'll notice I describe machines by role — "the Docker host," "the Pi," "a cloud micro in Phoenix" — rather than by name, and that IPs, IDs and ports are replaced with placeholders. That's deliberate, and it's the only thing I'm holding back.

What's coming

The Lab, Logged is the backbone: a series that walks through the whole lab, one layer at a time. It starts with a map of everything, then goes deep:

The Tailscale mesh that every other piece stands on
One container host running 90-plus services
A Kubernetes cluster stretched across four free cloud regions
Git, backups and never losing a repo
An AI agent fleet — and the rules that make it trustworthy
A control panel for five VPN overlays, travel routers that phone home, and the security layer watching all of it

Alongside it: build logs. A QR-code box inventory. A DNS cluster on three continents. A family location relay that got my kids off an app that sells their data. More after that.

And every so often, everything in between — career stuff, lessons learned, and whatever I'm tinkering with that week.

What to expect from me

Working code and real configs, cleaned up so you can adapt them.
The failures, not just the wins. The most useful thing I can give you is the bug that cost me an afternoon.
Honest status. If something is half-built or still just a plan, I'll say so.
A steady pace rather than a flood. Roughly a post a week.

About the tools

I use AI heavily in my day-to-day work — it's part of what I build and write about — and I use it here too, to help with drafting and diagrams. The systems, the decisions and the mistakes are all mine, and every post gets checked against the real thing before it goes out.

Say hello

If you run a homelab, work in infrastructure, or are just curious how the sausage gets made, I'd love to hear from you. Subscribe to get new posts by email, and read a bit more about me if you'd like.

First stop: a tour of everything I run.

Let's log some life.

— J