My homelab is where I run the things I build, try out ideas, and host game servers for friends. It changes depending on what I’m working on: a chat application one week, a tts engine the next, or a party game that only needs to exist for one evening.

Underneath it is a Kubernetes cluster spread across ARM and x86 Linux machines. Traefik handles web traffic and HTTPS, and newer projects get container images built through GitHub Actions. Having a shared place to deploy things makes it easier to give a small project a working URL and actually use it.

A lot of the experimentation is around local AI: running language models, generating speech. Meridian, my agent backend, and Xebec, its chat client, live here too. Running models on my own hardware means working within its limits; sometimes the solution is simply to stop one experiment before starting another.

The lab also hosts Minecraft and Valheim, and has been home to a Eurovision voting app and a Halloween game with phones and a shared TV screen.

Why this setup? Becuase it’s completly plug and play at this point. If the image exist, I can have it up, publically reachable within minutes.