Why#
I used to build computers. In my teens, I spent my hard-earned paperboy money and weekends selecting components, assembling hardware, and troubleshooting driver conflicts. There was something satisfying about understanding the machine from the ground up — every part chosen deliberately, every problem yours to solve. My first real smartphone had a custom ROM installed within the week.
Then life happened. A happy family. A career in IT advisory and management. Less time for real technical work and skill building, more convenience. I handed my digital life — and that of my family — to Big Tech, a growing list of vendor-locked smart devices, and subscriptions I stopped questioning. For a long time, that was fine. It only ached a little.
A few years ago I started noticing the cracks. Not dramatic failures — just a slow accumulation of things that felt wrong. Photos I couldn’t export cleanly. Documents locked in formats I didn’t choose. Services designed to keep you in, not let you out. Terms that changed, prices that rose, platforms that quietly disappeared. A growing sense that I was a tenant in my own digital life, paying rent to landlords I’d never chosen.
My sense of privacy became more important too. Every device around me was collecting data on my every movement. I knew, but didn’t act. Somewhere out there, a detailed digital avatar of me exists — available to parties I’ve never met, for purposes I’ve never agreed to. I know for a fact that I don’t own it.
Then we lost close family in the generation before us. I experienced firsthand what impact an undocumented and non-transferable digital legacy can have on the people left behind. Suddenly the question of continuity felt real. What happens to our family’s photos, documents, and memories if a company shuts down — or if I’m no longer around to manage it? Who holds the keys?
Everything added up. It was time for a real change.
The broader shift in the world has changed the European digital climate too. New windows of opportunity have opened up: companies with privacy as a genuine value proposition, affordable VPS infrastructure for consumers, open source products of growing quality, and — more importantly — strong communities behind them.
These shifts made something possible that wasn’t before. But possibility alone doesn’t build anything. I also needed principles to build on.
Open formats — because data should outlast the software that created it. Privacy by design — because privacy isn’t a feature you add later, it’s a decision you make at the start. Security by design — because you don’t bolt on security after the fact. Archiving by design — because digital continuity for your family begins with how you store data, not with how you search for it years later when something goes wrong.
These were things I believed in professionally but rarely got to apply. Here, they are simply how I build.
There’s a professional angle as well. In my professional life I advise and manage IT organisations with thousands of employees, millions of automated transactions, and strict compliance requirements. Every project demands full teams: decision boards, enterprise architects, developers of all kinds, infrastructure and security specialists, and layers of stakeholders. Projects always struggle to fit the bigger picture. There is little feedback loop between strategy, architecture, and implementation. Organisations are usually too large to close those gaps.
HomeStack is my attempt to do what large organisations rarely manage: build something where strategy, architecture, and implementation are genuinely aligned — where every decision traces back to a clear purpose, and where the person who sets the vision is also the one who writes the code, configures the infrastructure, and lives with the consequences.
AI tools have made this possible in a way it wasn’t before. Not just by making me faster, but by giving me access to the depth of knowledge that a full professional IT team would bring — architecture review, security analysis, documentation, troubleshooting — available when I need it, at the pace of a solo builder. What organisations spend millions trying to coordinate, I can now do for my family on a Sunday afternoon.
So I started building again. My first project build is HomeStack — a self-managed home infrastructure running on a Raspberry Pi 5. It replaces multi-cloud storage and introduces photo and file storage, a family wiki, financial dashboards, a shared password vault, and more — with open source software, on hardware I own, with some European VPS infrastructure in between, backed up to storage I control.
My partner doesn’t use a Linux terminal. My daughter is mobile only by birth — though I am teaching her to use a mouse. Our digital life needs to work for them, not just for me. HomeStack isn’t a personal project that happens to serve a family — it’s a family project that happens to be built by one person, with continuity and control as the core design principle. My family should be able to access their data regardless of what any tech company decides to do next — and ideally, regardless of what happens to me. Every architectural decision is tested against one question: will this still work when I’m not in the room?
These notes are where I think out loud. Not tutorials. Not polished guides. Just honest documentation of what I built, why I built it, and what I learned — and occasionally got wrong — along the way.