Turning the Homelab Into a Portfolio

The credential problem

I'm self-taught. I don't have a resume full of IT jobs to point to, and that's a real problem when you're trying to convince someone to take a chance on you for DevOps or infrastructure work. What I do have is a working fleet of machines I built, broke, and fixed myself, and at some point it clicked that this was worth more than a certificate if I presented it right.

Cleaning it up for strangers

The homelab as it existed in my house was full of things that shouldn't go public: real IP addresses, my router's DDNS hostname, actual usernames. Before any of it went on GitHub I scrubbed every file, swapping real hostnames for semantic ones like desktop, hp-node, and nas-node, and pulled the octets out of every config example.

Making the repo actually useful

A folder of scripts isn't a portfolio, it's a junk drawer. I wrote real Docker Compose files for every service running on the fleet, a README with an honest architecture diagram, and a set of short architecture decision records explaining choices like Caddy over Nginx and Tailscale over opening ports on my router. Those ADRs matter more than the code, because anyone can copy a docker-compose file off Stack Overflow.

Some of the reasoning is easier to defend than others. If someone asked me why I went with a ZFS pool instead of hardware RAID, the honest answer is that I wanted to stay modular. Those drives were never going to live in one machine forever, and I knew it going in. ZFS ties the pool to the disks, not to a RAID card bolted to one motherboard, so I could pull the drives, drop them into a completely different box, and import the pool without starting over. I'm not sure that's the "correct" textbook answer, but it's the real one, and I'd rather write down the actual reason I made a call than invent a cleaner one after the fact.

What it's actually done for me

The repo has become the thing I point people to instead of a resume line. It shows real decisions, real mistakes I owned up to in the troubleshooting log, and a system that's still running today, not a tutorial I followed once and tore down. That's turned out to be a better pitch than I expected for someone trying to break into this field without the usual paper trail.