Where I practise platform engineering outside of work.
My homelab is where I try out platform tools hands-on before I'd trust them anywhere that matters. It's a mix of a small Kubernetes cluster at home and an Azure Kubernetes Service setup, both run with GitOps, plus a lot of study along the way. A good chunk of it started from the KubeCraft courses, and I'm using the same masterclass to build up my Python. The lab changes all the time, so below is a short summary of a few repos rather than a detailed spec.
The GitOps repo for "mercury", a small AKS cluster that Flux keeps in sync with Git. It covers app deployment, managed secrets, backups and Grafana alerting that sends notifications to Telegram.
Terraform for the mercury platform on Azure, built phase by phase while working through the KubeCraft cloud course. This is my Terraform study repo, from the first VM through to the cluster, hardening and monitoring.
The GitOps repo for my single-node Kubernetes cluster at home. Flux deploys a few self-hosted apps and a Prometheus and Grafana monitoring stack, and Renovate keeps the versions current.
My scratchpad for Kubernetes fundamentals, scripting and small practice apps. It's where I try things out before they make it into the clusters.
Building with AI
I'm also experimenting with building apps alongside AI agents and seeing how far I can push it. The agents do most of the hands-on coding, and I bring my DevOps experience to set direction, guide the work and step in where it's needed.
Nice Pro Portions, a short home workout app I'm building for Android first in Flutter. A dedicated bot owns the project day to day, GitHub Actions checks every change and builds the releases, and a small Cloudflare Worker backend is planned. It isn't released yet. You can help: join the Android beta test, or read how it's built.
A club management web app for social running clubs: attendance, prepaid credits, bank matching and reimbursements. Staging and production environments, database tests in CI and row-level security throughout. The repo and demo are private while I prepare it for other clubs. Architecture and screenshots.
I'm also building a personal assistant dashboard the same way, kept in a private repo.