Comment by shermantanktop 7 hours ago
Most “homelabs” are built by a developer LARPing as a sysadmin, with a user population of one (themselves) or zero for most of the features.
It’s the SUV that has off-road tires but never leaves the pavement, the beginner guitarist with an arena-ready amp, the occasional cook with a $5k knife. No judgment, everyone should do what they want, but the discussions get very serious even though the stakes are low.
I don't personally have a homelab, but I think that (unlike a giant amp or SUV) the homelab lets you learn interesting skills that would be hard to learn otherwise. It seems more defensible to me.
I have a small setup that could be considered homelab-ish - a NAS, a server, Docker+Portainer running a variety of services including HomeAssistant, a Plex server, UPS with graceful shutdown, and other stuff. I agree it's educational, it certainly has been for me; but everything I run has a practical purpose.
People will build a huge multinode cluster in their basement with Raspberry PIs, and benchmark it to point out performance issues that they absolutely can't live with and so they are off to buy new SSDs or whatever. It's a hobby, but it's shaped like someone's actual job.
LARPing as a sysadmin has a lot of benefits. It's taught me Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
Which are all pretty useful considering my day job is a software engineer.
Many of these things have been directly applicable at work, e.g. when something weird happens in AWS, or we have a project using obscure Docker features.