Unsurprisingly I've been in my homelab a lot more. I like building a lot as we all know. The homelab allows me to build and keep cost low. Seriously, I cut my cloud cost in half lately. I wanted to just briefly talk about what I've been working on in my homelab. ## Proxmox All my friends on Proxmox! lol Well not all of them but the use of Proxmox seems to be growing in the community. I could use Vritualbox as well, but if you want something more similar to vSphere then this is it. The install was pretty easy and I found a video by the Tailscale team to validate the steps I took. The only hard part here is that I misunderstood my router setup so getting internet access was interesting. ## n8n I do believe I've briefly talked about this one. N8n is a workflow automation tool. I'm not super sold on it but it's like Zapier or ITTT. I'm looking for ways to reduce all the extra tools for my workflow, but also feeding info into my existing core tools. So far I have simple workflows like being able to take feedback for applications, and collect user emails into a db for my future "newsletter". I got some ideas for using n8n to cut down on distractions. I haven't figured it all out yet, but I'm trying to make out some of my personal workflows better so that I can maybe move them to n8n. I don't need everything over there, but I love the idea of effectively processing personal data. > Side note here. I got a book from the company CEO called "The Decoded Company". It's a really good book. I think everyone should read it and it's driving me to try to use n8n workflows a little more. ## Ollama Going to be honest with this one. I'm unsure what to do with it. I haven't really stepped into the local llm thing yet. I've got it there in case I want to pickup and go. I think I want to go back and use tensorflow like I did in grad school and then work my way over. Not sure, but we shall see. ## Nextcloud I can't let nextcloud go. I love it. I have used it for years. I'm trying to move it locally (with my old data) so that I can have another layer of backups. It works like google drive and honestly holds all my books. I use it as a library more than anything. I want to use it as my "core knowledge base" and then have dropbox and the NAS for everything else. Hopefully I figure out what all this means as time goes on. ## Gitea Gitea is my internal github. I think the one thing I don't like about it right now is that I have to use some workarounds to deal with the fact that this is running in a docker container without an outward url. Regardless I'm enjoying having both gitea for internal things and github for anything external. I'm not sure how I feel about Gitea Runners yet, nor do I want to admit that maybe I should have went with gitlab first. We shall see how my feelings change on this over time. ## Cursor This isn't really a homelab thing but I am using Cursor IDE. The thing is I hit my free limit pretty quick given the type of things I'm building lately. Cursor is more for TDD I think and that's ok, but unfortunately that isn't my default coding pattern. I also don't like how somehow `code` opens Cursor on 1 of my machines. Not really worth fixing it since I can pretty much code anywhere but yea...for awhile I was about to delete everything. ## Claude Code This has been my favorite tool lately. Everyone is right about Claude Code feeling like it's for the builders. I "prompt" it as if it's just a fellow engineer and things have been working out. Less loops and apologies than I had using Cursor. I can see the improvements in the way I prompt the more I use Claude and other AI tools. I have not really tried them for devops related things yet, but I assume it's around the corner.