Why Every Software Engineer Should Have Their Own Homelab

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:00:00 +0100

I’ve been working in tech for a long time. Earlier in my career I hadn’t thought about how powerful a homelab could be. I didn’t know then what I know now. Especially in the AI era, it’s important to have this kind of “playground”. And now I’d like to tell you something about that.

Why bother with a homelab

Cloud consoles are great, but they hide a lot. I already work with cloud-native tech daily, but a homelab is where I get to break things without a blast radius that matters to anyone but me. And no, you don’t have to have expensive, fancy servers to take advantage of the homelab approach. This is where I’ll tell you exactly how I built my own homelab. And keep in mind: it wasn’t a one-shot action. I spent a lot of time choosing the right (not too cheap, not too expensive) hardware, I spent a lot of time choosing what my main system should be, I spent a lot of time choosing what I’d like to self-host, and what I want to do with those services. And now I have a place not only for experiments, but also for “production-grade” systems like Home Assistant, which is used by me and my family.

Homelab on Łukasz Siedlecki

Why Every Software Engineer Should Have Their Own Homelab

Why bother with a homelab