Before we get too far, a quick note.
If you’ve read my posts before, you might be wondering what a “homelab” has to do with digital literacy or AI in education. Fair question. This might look like a tangent, but it’s really part of the same thread. Learning how the systems we rely on actually work.
I’ve always believed that understanding the “why” and “how” behind our tools is a form of literacy. Learning from the ground up about autonomy, infrastructure, and the future of digital literacy.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about ownership of data, of tools, of the ideas we create. It began as a technical curiosity, but quickly evolved into something more profound. The more I built my own systems, the more I realized how little control we often have over the infrastructure that shapes our daily digital lives.
In my prior work, I’ve always been building. Through my early WebMaker work, I explored, experimented with, and contributed to the development of web literacy. With digital badges, you need to design, earn, and award them. As I learn and teach about coding and computational thinking, I need to build and break things. I’m always building, tinkering, and testing things in all of my spaces.
When I started experimenting with running my own AI models earlier this year, I think I surprised a few people. Suddenly, I was talking about GPUs, tokens, and self-hosting models on local hardware. Friends and colleagues who follow my work in digital literacy and education looked at me like I’d started speaking another language.
And in a way, I had.
But behind all the jargon was a simple question: What does it mean to really understand the systems we rely on?
That question led me down a new rabbit hole. One that many technologists, educators, and tinkerers are familiar with, called homelabbing.
What Is a Homelab?
At its simplest, a homelab is just a personal computing environment you control.
It might be an old desktop running Linux in a corner, a tiny Raspberry Pi serving your files, or a small server rack quietly humming in the basement. It’s a space where you can experiment , break things, fix them, and learn how digital systems actually work.
Think of it like a garden.
You can buy vegetables from the store, or you can grow them yourself and understand what goes into the soil, the sunlight, and the care it takes to sustain them.
A homelab is that. Except instead of tomatoes, you’re growing your own cloud.
You could build a homelab to:
- Learn about virtualization, networks, and automation
- Host your own apps instead of relying on commercial cloud services
- Run experiments with local AI models
- Back up and secure your data on your own terms
- Just tinker for the joy of learning
Mine started small. Then I learned about Proxmox , a free virtualization platform that allows you to run multiple systems on a single machine. Then came containers (hello, Docker), media servers, and some home automation scripts that occasionally worked. Each new tool taught me something about the invisible machinery that keeps the modern internet running.
Why This Matters (Even If You’ll Never Build One)
For me, this isn’t just a hobby. It’s a form of digital literacy.
We often discuss “teaching with technology,” but rarely do we delve into understanding technology itself. The infrastructure, the architecture, and the systems thinking that underlie the glossy apps and platforms. Homelabbing offers a hands-on way to explore that.
It connects to so much of my ongoing work:
- Digital agency : Understanding how systems work means you can question, adapt, and shape them for your specific context.
- Critical infrastructure literacy : Knowing what “the cloud” really is —someone else’s computer—changes how we think about privacy, ownership, and trust.
- Pedagogy and practice : I want educators and students to see that technology isn’t magic. It’s made of choices. And those choices can empower—or exclude.
In a world where AI models, data, and even creativity increasingly live behind corporate APIs, building a homelab felt like reclaiming a small piece of the digital stack. It’s a way to experiment, to fail safely, and to remember that the web was once something you built , not something you simply used.
What I’m Learning So Far
Every problem I’ve hit has taught me something I didn’t know I didn’t know.
I’ve learned how permissions work (and how they can fail catastrophically).
I’ve learned what it means to run a virtual machine safely.
I’ve learned how fragile and beautiful a network can be when it’s entirely your responsibility.
And I’ve learned that the “hard” parts of homelabbing aren’t really about tech. They’re about patience, design, and clarity of purpose. What do I want this system to do? What does it mean to build infrastructure that reflects my values?
Those are questions worth wrestling with, whether you ever build a server or not.
Where This Series Is Going
Over the next few weeks, I will document this journey. Not as a technical manual, but as a reflective exploration of what it means to take ownership of your digital environment.
Here’s a rough map of where we’ll go:
- Mapping the Hardware — how I designed my setup and why
- Getting Virtual — learning about containers, VMs, and Proxmox
- Self-Hosting Essentials — running services like media, backups, and AI tools
- Automating and Learning — connecting it all through scripts, monitoring, and reflection
- The Bigger Picture — what homelabbing teaches us about autonomy, resilience, and digital literacy
Ultimately, this isn’t just about technology. It’s about understanding the systems that shape us , and imagining how we might shape them in return.
I’m not just building a server. Building a homelab is a new way of exploring, one command line at a time.