Ed Stuurman

The Sunk Cost of Homelab Sprawl: Knowing When to Liquidate Silicon

Why keeping cold spares, temperamental memory, and decommissioned enterprise switches is an operational trap—and the brutal solar and battery reality check of continuous idle rack draw.Every homelab operator knows the mental trap. It starts with an architectural vision: high availability, distributed quorum, offsite sync targets, or isolated sandbox nodes. Then reality settles in. Workloads stabilize, time becomes scarce, and suddenly a shelf in your workspace turns into a graveyard of high-end silicon.

I Can't Draw, So I Hired a Robot Design Team: Making the HOME-LAB.net Logo

I'm an infrastructure engineer who can't draw a straight line. Here's how a dozen rounds of 'nope, try again' with an AI design assistant turned into a logo I actually love for my homelab.I can design a multi-region network. I can untangle a Terraform state file at 2 a.m. What I cannot do is draw a logo. Every time I've tried, I end up in the same place: a monospace font, a little > prompt, and a quiet voice saying "this is fine, developers love this." It is not fine. It looks like every other side project on the internet.

Trenching the Yard Like a Data Center: East/West Water Feeds, 220V Corner Drops, and Biological Firewalls

What happens when an infrastructure engineer plans a garden upgrade in Japan—treating spigots like availability zones, over-provisioning 220V corner power for Christmas lights, lecturing garden valves about Zigbee physics, and replacing weeding toil with groundcover.When you spend your career designing distributed systems and homelab networks, it is physically impossible to turn that part of your brain off when you step outside with a shovel. Normal homeowners look at a backyard and see grass, bushes, and maybe a nice spot for a barbecue. I look at my yard and see single points of failure, unshielded runs, and an unacceptable amount of manual operational toil.

It Really Is a Series of Tubes: Surviving BGP Leaks, 95th-Percentile Transit, and Backhoes in seriesoftub.es

Why seriesoftub.es—an open-source browser game where you build an ISP from a single router to a transit-free Tier 1 carrier—is one of the most deceptively challenging networking simulations on the web.Back in 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens accidentally gave networking engineers their favorite meme of all time when he explained that the internet "is not a big truck—it’s a series of tubes." Twenty years later, Series of Tubes (seriesoftub.es)—an open-source browser game created by Fabian Jäckel (fjaeckel/seriesoftubes)—takes that quote literally and turns it into what is essentially SimCity or OpenTTD for ISP and network engineers.

The 30-Minute "Instant" Cloud Deployment: What AWS Is Actually Doing While Terraform Waits

Cloud marketing promises infrastructure in seconds, yet a greenfield multi-region Terraform apply still leaves you staring at a spinner for half an hour. Here is what is actually happening inside the AWS control plane while you wait.If you listen to cloud keynotes, modern Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is practically instantaneous. You write a few declarative blocks of HCL, type terraform apply, and a globally distributed edge architecture materializes out of thin air.

Trains, Signals, and Self-Inflicted Pain: Building Conway’s Game of Life in OpenTTD