Self-Hosting as Woodworking — Build the Workshop Before the Furniture
genesis document for the homelab that became the personal AI OS — three-body NAS, 10G ethernet, k3s cluster all trace back here
Self-Hosting as Woodworking — Build the Workshop Before the Furniture
The core move in this post is the craft metaphor. Self-hosting isn’t about replacing cloud services with cheaper alternatives. It’s woodworking. You build the workshop first — the bench, the tools, the jigs — and the furniture comes later. The workshop is the point. That framing rejects the datacenter mindset where infrastructure is a cost center you minimize.
The Kubernetes-as-Vim comparison is the line that sticks: start small, build up. Nobody learns Vim by reading the docs cover-to-cover. You learn hjkl, then visual mode, then macros, then you’re customizing init.lua at 2am. k8s works the same way — spin up k3s on one box, run a pod, add a service, graduate to multi-node when the pain demands it. The post links out to Mike Royal’s self-hosting guide as a reference map for that incremental journey.
The hardware story grounds the philosophy in specifics. The Asustor NAS named three-body (after Liu Cixin’s trilogy), 10G ethernet for fast local transfers, the whole homelab genesis. This isn’t a theoretical exercise — it’s a running system that evolved into the infrastructure behind joelclaw.com, the Inngest event bus, the video ingest pipeline, and the k3s cluster ambitions. The post captures the moment before all of that — when it was just a NAS and a philosophy.
Key Ideas
- Self-hosting is woodworking, not IT — the workshop is the product, not overhead
- k8s is like Vim — start with the basics, accumulate capability incrementally, don’t try to learn everything at once
- Mike Royal’s Self-Hosting Guide — comprehensive reference map for the self-hosting landscape
- three-body — the Asustor NAS that anchors the homelab, named with intent
- 10G ethernet — local network speed that makes self-hosting practical for media-heavy workflows
- Sovereignty as philosophy — own the hardware, own the data, own the platform. Mirrors the AT Protocol bet on data ownership at the protocol level