If you want to git gud you need to have some projects of your own. And it does not need to look like a @technotim thumbnail.
Raccoon Cloud #
Ask your friends if they have any unused pc’s, hard drives, anything, other peoples trash makes a surprisingly great homelab. This is not just your starting point but where you keep an eye out for new nodes that you can join to your cluster.
- $20 sub to openai, anthropic, opencode, cursor, just pick one
Bare Bones #
No friends, look for any refurbished enterprise mini pcs. These work great for low power compute nodes. They do not handle a lot of disk, you will need a larger case for that.
- a sub $200 optiplex
Drives #
Don’t put critical data on dying drives, have backups, buy reliable drives. I’ve had good luck at https://serverpartdeals.com/.
The Software #
I’m bullish on kubernetes. It’s easier than twitter will make you think, its robust, agents can manage it for you fantastically if you have no interest. just fucking use kubernetes
Free Tier #
If you are a digital nomad, have no place for a spare pc, or just plain no extra cash and no friends, you can get a long ways on free tier static hosting.
- cloudflare pages for hosting (netlify, vercel, github pages; are all great as well)
- fly.io for hosting containers
- github actions for building
- opencode for getting your ideas implemented