I always have at least a few projects queued up or in progress, but recently I decided to get better organized with some personal project management. I installed Planka in my homelab and I’ve been filling it up with ideas, maintenance tasks, and issues for both homelab projects and house projects. Planka is essentially a Trello clone that’s missing a lot of Trello’s better features, but for now it’s where I’ve landed as it works pretty well and I’m hopeful that the project will stay active and keep adding features.
My initial brain dump has resulted in an interesting list, featuring ideas such as:
- Self-hosted certificate authority
- VS Code server
- System self-healing, performing auto-shutdown/power-up for power failures and restoration
- A dashboard for family-facing applications
- System-wide logging using Loki and Prometheus
- Grafana for viewing and analyzing logs
- SearXNG, a private, local search engine
- Frigate for AI camera monitoring
- OpenTofu + Ansible for lab automation
- Dedicated machine for running VMs, especially for legacy OSes
- ntfy for self-hosted push notifications
- Enclosed for sharing ephemeral notes
I’d like to complete the whole list this year, but as things typically go, this list is likely to grow and change, and there’s only so much time in a day/week/month to make things happen. If I had to pick three for the year, my biggest priorities right now are:
- Self-hosted certificate authority
- System-wide logging using Loki and Prometheus
- OpenTofu + Ansible for lab automation
Everything else is nice-to-have, but these are essential. A self-hosted CA would allow me to completely segregate internal sites from external sites, increasing lab security. System-wide logging is long overdue; I frequently spend far too much time trying to figure out what’s happening in my lab when I could easily answer many questions by reviewing logs. And lab automation is a big one for saving time as well, not having to spend countless hours recovering from a disaster by manually rebuilding everything.