Want to sharpen your skills, cut subscriptions, and maybe turn your basement into a personal data center? In this After Dark session, we’ll take a guided tour of today’s most popular self-hosted services and home lab setups — equal parts practical and fun.

We’ll start with the basics: homelab hardware tiers (from Raspberry Pi clusters to enterprise gear), design approaches, and common hypervisors like Proxmox, Unraid, and TrueNAS. From there, the good stuff — we’ll explore fun and helpful self-hosted services and satisfying automations:

• Centralized identity, reverse proxies, and secure access
• Monitoring stacks with Prometheus + Grafana
• Pipelines and automation with Jenkins + Ansible
• Storage design with ZFS/Btrfs and backup strategies (3-2-1, automation, off-site)
• Must-have open-source apps: media servers (Jellyfin, Plex), file sync (Nextcloud, Immich), password managers (Vaultwarden), home automation (Home Assistant), and more

Throughout, we’ll connect home lab tinkering back to DevOps principles: pipelines for service updates, monitoring dashboards for observability, and documentation practices that would make your future self proud.

And because it’s After Dark, expect candid stories about what worked, what broke, and why sometimes the “enterprise-at-home” setup sounds better than it actually is.