Pillar
Guides
Long-form tutorials and buying guides.
ZFS pool design for a 4-bay homelab: the decisions that actually matter
A practical guide to designing a ZFS pool for a 4-bay homelab in 2026. Mirror vs RAIDZ, drives, ashift, recordsize, special vdevs, and the boring ops that decide if the pool survives.
Coolify: when you want Heroku/Vercel ergonomics without the Heroku/Vercel bill
Christian Lempa shipped a January 28 Coolify tutorial. The product has matured into the right self-hosted PaaS for 2026. Honest write-up after migrating side projects off Vercel.
OPNsense + Prometheus + Grafana: the homelab firewall monitoring stack in 2026
Christian Lempa shipped a January 20 OPNsense monitoring tutorial. The stack (OPNsense + node_exporter + Grafana Alloy) replaces hand-rolled scripts and finally feels finished.
Pangolin: the self-hosted Cloudflare-Tunnel replacement that finally landed in 2026
Pangolin started as a hobbyist project in 2024. By January 2026 it is a credible zero-trust VPN replacement for Cloudflare Tunnel. Honest write-up after migrating my homelab.
NetBox for the homelab: when your IP spreadsheet finally needs a real tool
Christian Lempa shipped a NetBox tutorial in mid-December. The homelab community keeps rediscovering that spreadsheets stop scaling at 30+ services. Honest write-up after migrating.
N8N + AI agents for homelab automation: the patterns that actually work in November 2025
N8N + local LLM + a few well-placed integrations replaced the cron-and-shell-script layer of my homelab. Honest write-up of what works, what does not, and what the YouTube tutorials skip.
Building a personal Claude Code workflow — the daily-driver setup
IndyDevDan's Sep 15 "Agentic Prompt Engineering" + Elite Context + Output Styles videos + r/ClaudeAI's "6 months of hardcore use" (2313 ups) frame the daily-driver setup. Exact config.
pgvector vs Cloudflare Vectorize — where each one actually fits
Both do vector search; both optimize for different shapes. Theo's Postgres consolidation + r/Rag practitioner thread + Lempa's Cloudflare Workers content frame the decision matrix.
NAS drive buying guide 2025 — when 18TB used enterprise is the right call
HDD prices doubled through 2025. r/homelab "Hard drive prices have doubled" (1121 ups) + "vendor unacceptable shipping" (2272 ups) + Lawrence Systems framing shape the buying calculus.
Claude Code + Vim, Helix, JetBrains — the editor-agnostic AI workflow
Claude Code runs in a terminal — so it works with any editor. IndyDevDan's Hooks + Plan Mode workflow + the r/neovim community's Aug 2025 patterns combined into a working setup.
Building a 3-node Proxmox HA cluster — the homelab high-availability path
A 3-node Proxmox cluster with HA is achievable under $1,500 in 2025. Craft Computing's CEPH tutorial + Lempa's LXC framing + r/homelab dashboard threads = the working build.
Cloudflare Workers + D1 in production — the real-world build pattern
D1 hit production-ready in 2024 and matured fast. r/nextjs "Vercel CPU 3x slower" benchmark + Lempa's Cloudflare Workers content + r/CloudFlare 4-year SaaS tips frame the working stack.
.cursorrules patterns from real engineers — what actually moves the needle
r/cursor's "gold standard files" thread (235 ups) + "Claude Code prompt to auto-generate" (181 ups) + IndyDevDan's Claude Code curriculum frame what actually works for project rules.
Building your own MCP server for Claude Code: a working tutorial
After running ten community MCP servers for months, the next step is writing your own. Here is the start-to-finish tutorial, including the parts the docs gloss over.
Linear Cycles for solo engineers: how to use them without the team you don't have
Linear Cycles are designed for teams. Solo and tiny-team engineers get more out of them than the docs suggest — if you adapt the workflow.
Aider best practices — the first-week workflow that makes it actually work
Aider rewards specific working patterns. r/ClaudeAI "6 months pair programming" (1459 ups) + r/aider thread + IndyDevDan's Plan Mode video frame the workflow. Three months of daily use.
Building a quiet homelab server in 2025: the parts list and the silence trade-offs
Quiet homelab is now achievable without spending FAANG-money. The hardware is here, the trade-offs are tractable. Here is the working parts list and the noise-vs-capability math.
Neon Postgres branching — using your database like a git branch
Neon turned Postgres branching into a workflow. r/PostgreSQL "Comparing branching costs Supabase vs Neon vs Xata" + Theo's Postgres consolidation frame the working pattern. Six months on Neon.
MCP servers for Claude Code: the essential first ten to wire up
MCP is the protocol that turns Claude Code from a sharp CLI into a connected agent. After three months of wiring servers in, here are the ten that earn permanent space in my setup.