20+ Years ago my lab was a Mac Classic, then a Gateway Desktop, then anything I could get my hands on...
Today it's two Dell PowerEdge rack servers (R710 and R610), a 6-GPU AI cluster built from used gaming cards, seven Raspberry Pis each with a different job, a QNAP NAS, a TrueNAS storage server, a KVM host running virtual machines, and over 40 Docker containers — all managed by AI agents I built myself.
The evolution wasn't planned. Each project solved a real problem, and each solution created new possibilities. Pi-hole led to a rack server. The rack server led to Docker. Docker led to automation. Automation led to AI agents. AI agents led to... well, they manage most of it now.
The entire infrastructure is self-hosted. No cloud dependencies. DNS, VPN, media, backups, monitoring, AI inference, phone system, print business automation — all running from a corner of the garage in Middle Tennessee.
Total investment over three years: less than what most companies spend on SaaS subscriptions in a single month.
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