Journal

Formalized how I think about security at home: least privilege, segmentation, and visibility not just "more boxes," but defensible architecture.

Stood up a SIEM-style stack to surface anomalies across connected devices: centralized signals, correlation, and a mindset closer to what I'd expect in an enterprise SOC conversation.

Folded Ubiquiti into the design UCG, managed switch, and AP so Wi‑Fi, routing, and policy feel like one fabric instead of a pile of one-off consumer routers.

Spent serious time in the professional FDM world: Ultimaker and Bambu Lab ecosystems, additional vendor hardware where it mattered, and deep work on G-code generation, tuning, and research not only "does it print," but why failures happen.

That year also marked the first real push into Kubernetes at home: not a toy cluster, but patterns I could explain in an interview availability, workloads, and how I'd run services I actually care about.

Moved public-facing concerns behind Cloudflare: reverse proxy, DNS, and domain management in one place.

That shift made TLS, caching, and routing easier to reason about and set the stage for later zero-trust and tunnel work without redoing the whole naming story.

Outgrew "a disk in a box": added an HBA-backed DAS, stood up TrueNAS, and started treating storage like infrastructure pools, redundancy with RAID, and containers for services instead of snowflake installs.

Began thinking in terms of data sovereignty and aggregation: one place data lands, clear backups, and utilization across workloads instead of silos.

Used Tailscale early as a safe funnel for remote access encrypted overlays before I had the full Cloudflare Tunnel story nailed down.

Started on a laptop with the Linux CLI as the daily interface no GUI crutch, just learning how systems actually behave.

Stacked network and media services the classic homelab way: Pi-hole for DNS-level blocking, Jellyfin for streaming, and the *arr suite for library automation.

Looking back, it was the seed of everything later: curiosity about uptime, dependencies, and "what breaks when I change one thing."