Welcome to Hewserv: My Self-Hosting Journey

If you want to pinpoint the exact moment my tech journey began, you’d have to ask my parents. They have a Polaroid of me, age three, standing on my tippy toes to press the power button on our family computer. Apparently, I was so obsessed with playing games on it that they eventually had to move the entire setup into a closet, knowing I wasn't tall enough to open the door.

Some things never change.

I've been hooked for as long as I can remember, and this blog—Hewserv—is where I plan to document my adventures in the world of self-hosting, automation, and personal tech projects. It’s a journey that started with a lucky find in the fifth grade.

My parents let me buy a super cheap, decommissioned laptop from the DNR. I didn't realize at the time, but it came without a modern OS, only a disc for something like Windows 95. That "problem" turned out to be a gift. It forced me to dive headfirst into the world of Linux. I spent countless hours wrestling with different distros, barely making it through well-documented tutorials, and slowly learning the command line. Eventually, I’d get a control panel like Virtualmin installed and proudly host my first simple websites.

My passion was always there, but it truly ignited in college thanks to a stroke of luck with a roommate. I was still just playing around with things like my own Active Directory instance, but he was already deep into hosting game servers. It was a match made in tech heaven. We spent our nights spinning up Microsoft Flight Simulator X servers, building a shared music library we could control from anywhere, and tackling countless other fun projects. He’s still a great friend today.

That collaborative spark took my interest and turned it into a full-blown obsession.

Today, "Hewserv" has evolved from a few old desktops into a proper homelab. I run a beast of a custom-built server, manage dozens of Docker containers and LXCs, host websites for family and friends, run my own private cloud with Nextcloud, and even connect my home network to my parents' with a site-to-site VPN.

The heart of the lab is a new rig I just built to be an absolute AI and virtualization workhorse. It’s powered by an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-core CPU and a whopping 96GB of DDR5 RAM. The real star of the show is a GeForce RTX 3090 with 24GB of VRAM, which is already powering my first experiments with local AI. I've got Ollama instances up and running, and I absolutely can't wait to dive deeper into exploring different language models and get into image generation. It’s all housed in a proper Phanteks server case, with a speedy 2TB NVMe drive running the OS and all the containers. For bulk storage, an LSI HBA card manages a mirrored ZFS pool built on four 2TB drives, with two more on the way—though I’m barely using 1TB of it so far, haha. I’ll be doing a full deep-dive on the build in a future post, but for now, it's a dream machine.

More importantly, I’m not just using tech anymore—I’m building with it, from Python scrapers that solve real-world business problems to new projects I can't wait to share.

So that’s the mission for this site: to explore technology, one project at a time, and share what I learn along the way. I’ll be doing deep dives on my homelab setup, breaking down my coding projects, and sharing tutorials I wish I’d had when I started.

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you'll follow along.