Notes from a homelab. Proxmox, Kubernetes, and whatever breaks next.https://whenkat.com/https://whenkat.com/blog/episode-01-home-ai-server-research/https://whenkat.com/blog/episode-01-home-ai-server-research/What it costs and what it takes to build a machine for running LLMs at home. EPYC 7702P, 256GB of RAM, and a lot of used server hardware from eBay.Tue, 11 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://whenkat.com/blog/episode-02-home-ai-server-gpu/https://whenkat.com/blog/episode-02-home-ai-server-gpu/I bought a 16GB card first and learned it was the wrong axis to optimize. What running models on a 4070 Ti Super and then a 3090 taught me about what actually limits local inference.Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://whenkat.com/blog/homelab-ep1-proxmox/https://whenkat.com/blog/homelab-ep1-proxmox/I was running several Docker Compose stacks on a single Ubuntu server with no IaC and no plan. Here is what pushed me to rebuild it properly with Proxmox and OpenTofu.Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://whenkat.com/blog/homelab-ep2-talos/https://whenkat.com/blog/homelab-ep2-talos/Talos Linux has no SSH, no shell, and no package manager. That sounded like a downgrade until I understood it was the fix for the problem that pushed me off Ubuntu.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://whenkat.com/blog/homelab-ep3-networking/https://whenkat.com/blog/homelab-ep3-networking/A bare metal cluster has no load balancer to hand out IPs. Cilium solves that. It could also handle L7 routing, but I gave that job to NGINX instead, and I have a reason.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://whenkat.com/blog/homelab-ep4-outside-the-cluster/https://whenkat.com/blog/homelab-ep4-outside-the-cluster/DNS and OpenTofu state both have to exist before Kubernetes does. Putting either one inside the cluster creates a dependency loop with no way out, so they run as LXC containers on Proxmox instead.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://whenkat.com/blog/homelab-ep5-argocd/https://whenkat.com/blog/homelab-ep5-argocd/I picked ArgoCD because I saw it working at my company and wanted to try it, not because I evaluated it against anything. Here is what running it at home actually changed.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://whenkat.com/blog/logging-in-go-apps/https://whenkat.com/blog/logging-in-go-apps/A practical guide to structured logging with Go 1.21 log/slog. Leveled logging, structured attributes, and context propagation for Grafana tracing.Sat, 23 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://whenkat.com/blog/own-your-platform-ep1-leaving-medium/https://whenkat.com/blog/own-your-platform-ep1-leaving-medium/After years on Medium, I moved my writing to a site I actually own. The stack is Astro, the workflow is a git push, and the reason is simpler than you might think.Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://whenkat.com/blog/own-your-platform-ep2-self-hosting/https://whenkat.com/blog/own-your-platform-ep2-self-hosting/How I serve whenkat.com from a home server without port forwarding, a static IP, or exposing anything to the internet. The trick is Cloudflare Tunnel, and the connection is outbound.Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT