A quick update before April ends.

I quit my job in March. Main goal now: take a proper break, work on my own projects, and ideally never go back to being someone’s employee again.

What Happened Over the Last 2 Months #

Momentum got wrecked by ICT (as usual). Happens every year, and every year it kills whatever streak I had going. Then Ramadhan came right after, so I paused most of my hobbies.

But I’ve shifted gears—back into software dev after spending most weekends pre-March on self-hosting.

Here’s what I’ve been playing around with lately:

• Messed around with devcontainers and GitHub Codespaces
• Half-migrated from Bookstack to Docmost
• Self-hosted an Imgur-like image hosting service
• Tried to build a web scraper in 2 hours — failed
• Played with Fly.io
• Hooked up Node-RED on Home Assistant with Telegram bots
• Sampled every new “vibe coding tool” I could find
• Turned 32
• Started designing 1 mobile app + 1 SaaS
• Setup a company
• Helped my wife set up a WordPress blog on Hostinger
• Went longkang fishing with the kids. Unexpectedly fun. Now I have a fish tank at home — the fishes we caught died, so I had to buy more to fill the tank :)
• Experimented with Astro to replace this Hugo blog

Didn’t feel like much until I wrote it down. Turns out it’s a solid list. I’ll go deeper into some of these projects soon.

Home Server Woes #

Proxmox has been acting up. Server randomly zombifies — Proxmox UI loads, but all my LXCs are dead. Haven’t had time to troubleshoot properly, but it’s getting annoying.

Unraid has been solid… except when the power tripped while I wasn’t home and the UPS failed. Or when my toddler pressed the power button.

New plan: clean separation per app — each app’s DB, cache, storage, etc., should live on the same machine. Only possible exception: might run Proxmox Backup Server as a VM on Unraid.

Goal now is to move all the data-heavy stuff to Unraid, including Immich. To do that, I’ll need to swap the motherboard and upgrade the RAM.

Still figuring out the best way to write while I build — so I’m not rewriting everything again later just to make a post.

More updates soon.