Welcome!
Welcome to my portfolio/blog. First post on a long line of future posts!
First off, welcome! This is my blog & portfolio site, powered by Jekyll and GitHub Pages. I originally used Astro, but I wasn’t a fan of its folder structure—I kept navigating to the slug folders instead of the content folders when creating new posts. Thankfully, after watching a recent video from Techno Tim (huge fan of his), I saw he was using Jekyll for his self-hosted setup. That got me curious, so I dug into the documentation and made the switch.
Along the way, I found this awesome theme, jekyl-klise, which works well with GitHub Pages. The only downside is that the plugin jekyl-postfilesisn’t supported, meaning I have to store images in the _assets folder instead of keeping them alongside posts. It’s a minor inconvenience, but it would be nice to have everything in one place.
Current homelab setup—yeah, it’s a bit dusty.
Now, onto my homelab setup. I’m running a Proxmox cluster with two HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini PCs, each equipped with an i5-6500T. For the price (cheaper than a Raspberry Pi 5, even with shipping), they’re a steal. I also repurposed some drives from my first gaming PC build back in 2016, which was definitely not power-efficient.
Recently, I picked up a Raspberry Pi 5 and three PoE+ HATs with built-in NVMe SSD slots. Previously, I used the Waveshare PoE HAT, but it lacked NVMe support. My plan is to set up a K3S cluster on these Pi 5s to learn about load balancing, replication, and Kubernetes. I could have done this with VMs, but running it on dedicated hardware just feels more real. Plus, let’s be honest—stacked Raspberry Pis just look cool. And when it comes to clusters, three or more is the magic number. Speaking of which, I plan to add a third node to my Proxmox cluster in the future.
As for services, since I recently rebuilt my homelab, I’m currently running Traefik, GitLab, and a simple homepage for easy access and monitoring. I also have a Synology DS224+ NAS for backups and file storage—nothing fancy, but it does the job. Oh, and a UPS backup, because the power tends to go out around here during storms.
That’s the setup for now! I plan to post more frequently—sharing my journey, tutorials, and anything else that comes to mind. Hope to see you back here soon!