My Homelab exists primarily to give me a space to hack stuff together for work, not because work doesn’t provide stuff (they’ve in fact provided all of this), but because I often build stuff that needs re-cabled, re-designed, re-configured multiple times in a day - which wouldn’t work well if it were hosted in one of our datacenters. In addition to that, my homelab provides a place where I can build out my indoor air quality system, which has a lot of back end infrastructure to make everything work right.

There’s a pretty big movement inside of tech that you must have a homelab, and I very much disagree with that. I think when you’re starting out, you need a safe place to make mistakes, but I don’t believe you should have to do that at home. I believe that our employers should provide lab space that gives us opportunities to learn, grow, and figure out things as we go.