Home/Grown – Intro

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single byte

During the pandemic, like many others, I found myself working from home and spending a lot more time alone.

It was a strange period. Anxiety was running high, social media often seemed to be bringing out the worst in people and I found myself increasingly questioning the way I interacted with technology and, perhaps more importantly, the way it interacted with me.

While I worked, I often had YouTube, documentaries or long-form interviews playing in the background. The nature of the work I was doing at the time lent itself quite well to that and, aside from providing a bit of company, it sent me down all sorts of unexpected rabbit holes.

One of those was privacy.

Home/Grown is a series about what grew out of that period: an interest in privacy, networking and self-hosting which gradually developed into a homelab and eventually into something much broader.

There was never really a plan.

A small solution led to another. Privacy led into networking, networking led into self-hosting and before long a collection of computers, Raspberry Pis and services around the house had become something resembling a proper homelab.

Over the years that followed, it continued to grow, both in scale and ambition. What started largely as curiosity became a way of learning, experimenting and taking greater control over the technology I relied upon.

More recently, that journey has taken another unexpected turn with artificial intelligence and the development of Isaac, my own local AI system.

Looking back, the technology isn’t really the whole story. The lab has grown, certainly, but in many ways I have grown alongside it.

Home/Grown is the story of how that happened.

In this series

Part I: Breaking the Feed
How social media fatigue sent me down the privacy rabbit hole, eventually changing the way I thought about my digital life.

Part II: Building the Veil
How DNS, filtering, VPNs and layered security began putting a little more distance between me and the wider internet.

Part III: Making it Mine
How experimenting with Raspberry Pis and self-hosted services gradually grew into a homelab of my own.