I’ve been running homelabs for years, and I’ll be honest: for the first few of those years, I was doing it wrong. I had the hardware. I had the hypervisor. I had a rack that looked impressive in my garage. But I wasn’t actually learning anything. I was just playing IT infrastructure manager for a network that served no real purpose.
The shift happened when I stopped asking “what gear should I buy?” and started asking “what skill am I trying to build?” That reframe changed everything about how I approach lab work, and it’s the foundation of what I now share through TanLab.