🚀 This is the beginning
After years of dreaming about a corner of the internet to document my homelab adventures, rants, discoveries, and occasional tech mishaps — Johnosoft is live.
This post is the welcome mat. If you’ve stumbled in here from a search result, an RSS reader, or a friend’s link, here’s what you’re looking at and whether it’s for you.
What this space is
Section titled “What this space is”A digital workshop and journal for someone who loves running their own infrastructure.
I host a handful of services for myself, my family, and a small circle of friends — a password vault, a private cloud for files and calendars, an email server that I actually own, a git forge for personal projects, a media library, an identity provider that ties them all together. The list grows; the principles don’t. I want to be the one who knows where my data is, who configures the policies that govern it, and who picks up the pieces when something breaks at 2 a.m.
This blog is where the what I learned along the way lives. Setup guides, daily discoveries, things that worked, things that didn’t, and the long debugging journeys that always teach more than the polished tutorials they eventually become.
Who this is for
Section titled “Who this is for”- Fellow self-hosters who want field notes from someone running an opinionated stack at home plus a public-facing VPS.
- Curious lurkers thinking about whether self-hosting is for them.
- Future me who, in eighteen months, won’t remember which
docker composeflag fixed the thing that broke last weekend.
If any of those describe you, you’re in the right place.
What to expect
Section titled “What to expect”- How-to guides — step-by-step setups for services, from bare-metal provisioning to the boring-but-essential reverse-proxy and certificate plumbing.
- Lessons learned — when something breaks (and it always does), the bug bestiaries get written down here. Often these are the most useful posts in retrospect.
- Behind the scenes — design decisions, architecture trade-offs, and reflections on what makes self-hosting different from running enterprise systems on someone else’s cloud.
- Occasional rambles — about why computing is still fun, why I came back to it at forty after a long detour, and the small joys of watching a freshly booted VM come up clean.
This isn’t a tutorial site or a polished documentation portal. It’s a journal. The posts are personal; the conclusions are mine. If your stack is different, take what’s useful and leave the rest.
A note on tools
Section titled “A note on tools”The site you’re reading is itself a small project — a static site generated from markdown, deployed behind a reverse proxy, search powered by an in-browser index that never phones home. Every choice here mirrors the bigger philosophy: own your infrastructure, including the one you publish from. I’ll write about the build at some point, because the how of the site is part of the journal too.
Whether you’re a fellow self-hoster, a curious lurker, or one of my kids checking to see if Dad’s famous yet — welcome. This is just the beginning, and I’m genuinely excited to see where it goes.
Now excuse me while I go over-engineer a backup system for my over-engineered backup system. Because… priorities. 😅