What started as a simple student portfolio turned into a sprawling self-hosted ecosystem over three years from collaborative resumes with Overleaf to AI-powered grammar checks, personal video streaming, and even social media backups.
In this talk, I’ll share how I gradually replaced online tools with self-hosted alternatives using nothing more than second-hand gaming PCs and a lot of stubbornness. I’ll walk through the lessons learned, the infrastructure rabbit holes, and the joy of building a personal cloud one that runs from a shared bedroom, often without a static IP, and doubles as my daily-use PC.
Whether you're a student trying not to spend a dollar, a privacy nerd wary of vendor lock-in, or just curious about how much of a pain it is, this session will show how fun and empowering it can be to take back control and how even outages can teach you something.
Expect stories and takeaways including:
- Repurposing affordable second-hand hardware and flashing it for new life
- Starting with Docker containers on Debian and growing into Proxmox LXC workloads and other wizardry
- Navigating NAT hell, reverse proxies, and dynamic DNS without prior experience
- Hosting tools like Jellyfin, Overleaf, Gitea, Ollama, and more without ever paying for the cloud
- Archiving social media and sharing family memories in new, meaningful ways
- Building confidence and technical skills through real ownership and loads of crashes
- Why open source communities matter, and how today's users are tomorrow's maintainers.
I'll also walk through a roadmap from one-day wins with just dynamic DNS, to multi-year plans involving self-hosted monitoring, backups, and personal AI tools. Whether you're just starting or ready to scale your home lab, you’ll leave with a clear idea of where to begin and how far you can go before your ISP starts calling you.
This is a story of tinkering, resourcefulness, and the quiet joy of saying, “Yeah, I host that myself.” And it all began with just a portfolio.
