Self-Hosting Is Woodworking and Kubernetes Is Vim
origin story for three-body NAS and the incremental infrastructure path toward k3s (ADR-0025)
Self-Hosting Is Woodworking and Kubernetes Is Vim
This is the genesis post for the whole homelab. The piece that explains why the Asustor NAS got named three-body, why there’s 10G ethernet running through the office, and what philosophy drives the infrastructure decisions downstream of all of it.
The core metaphor: self-hosting is woodworking. You don’t start by building a dining table — you start by building the shop. A workbench. Some jigs. You accumulate tools and skill together, and the projects you can take on grow with your capability. Mike Royal’s self-hosting guide gets a nod as the reference catalog for what’s possible, but the post isn’t about picking from a menu. It’s about the practice itself.
The Kubernetes analogy is the sharpest line: k8s is like Vim — start small, build up. Nobody learns Vim by reading the manual cover to cover. You learn i, Esc, :wq and you’re productive on day one. Everything after that is incremental. Same with k8s — you don’t need to understand CRDs and service meshes to run a useful cluster. Start with a single node, deploy one thing, learn as you go. The complexity is opt-in, not prerequisite. That’s the whole k3s bet in ADR-0025 — lightweight Kubernetes that doesn’t demand you become a platform engineer before you get anything running.
The post also captures a specific moment in time: the transition from “I have a NAS for backups” to “I have infrastructure I control.” That’s the inflection point where self-hosting stops being a hobby and starts being a platform. Everything that came after — Inngest on the event bus, Qdrant for search, Redis for state, the video ingest pipeline — traces back to this decision to own the stack.
Key Ideas
- Self-hosting as craft practice — the woodworking metaphor frames infrastructure as a skill you develop incrementally, not a product you install
- Kubernetes is Vim — start with the minimum viable commands, add complexity as you need it, never front-load the entire learning curve
- Mike Royal’s Self-Hosting Guide — comprehensive catalog of self-hostable services, referenced as the “what’s possible” map
- The NAS as genesis — three-body (Asustor NAS) with 10G ethernet was the first real infrastructure investment, everything else grew from there
- Ownership as philosophy — self-hosting isn’t about saving money or avoiding cloud bills, it’s about sovereignty over your own data and platform
- Incremental complexity — the path from NAS → Docker → k3s mirrors the Vim learning curve: each layer is optional until you need it