This started the way most tinkering projects do: a spare laptop, a vague idea, and stakes low enough that trying seemed worth it.
I’d had the laptop for over five years. A 2013 Dell business laptop I picked up cheap when my previous company was clearing out old hardware. I’d upgraded it over the years, used it here and there for small projects, kept it around as a backup laptop, but it never really found a permanent use. Mostly it just sat in various sort of drawer.
The setup for a home server didn’t look that complicated. Install Linux, install Docker, run some containers. If it didn’t work out, it was a drawer laptop anyway. Low risk.
The upside felt real too. My photos situation had been nagging at me for a while. I had some on my phone, some backed up to Koofr, some on an external hard drive I hadn’t plugged in for months. And everything else in Google Photos, the only place they all existed together, which felt like a fragile position to be in. I’m not paranoid (I guess every paranoid person will say this but still), but if I can keep my own copy of something important without too much inconvenience, it’s worth trying.
I’d bought a 1TB Koofr lifetime deal a couple of years earlier anyway. I hate subscriptions, so the lifetime deal made sense, and the storage was already there.
Where AI tools actually helped#
I use the command line at work, so the technical side wasn’t intimidating. But self-hosting means constantly running commands you didn’t understood (I am sort of noob in using command line and Linux in general), and it doesn’t always feel obvious what they’re actually doing. That’s where AI tools became genuinely useful. To get things running quickly and ask for explanations when something broke or didn’t make sense. I had a list of things I wanted to set up and I wanted them all running as fast as possible, and AI helped with that. Some things I had to come back to later and fix properly. But good enough to keep moving, and you learn more along the way than you’d expect.
And honestly? Once things started clicking into place, it was just fun. There’s something satisfying about getting a service running, opening a URL in your browser, and having it just work. That feeling carried me through the parts that didn’t go so smoothly.
What I built#
Over a few days of tinkering, I ended up with a home server that handles:
- Photo management: a self-hosted alternative to Google Photos, with AI features like face recognition and smart search
- Remote access: so everything works the same whether I’m home or travelling
- Backups: because owning your own server doesn’t mean skipping backups
- Network-wide ad blocking: every device, no app required
- A few small utilities: document tools, drive health monitoring, a dashboard
The rest of this series goes through each piece. The first thing I set up, and the thing that made this whole project feel real, was Immich.