Devember is back! 
This year is all about home lab. This is your time to challenge yourself, see self-improvement, and to dedicate yourself to see the end of a project.
Foreward
What’s the goal? Well, let me explain.. I think, much to the detriment of society, a lot of life prepares you to follow somebody else’s process, stay in your lane, learn your piece and then let somebody else worry about how it all fits together.
Devember this year is an excuse to explore connecting the dots yourself. Pick something you wish existed, or something you wish worked better in your own life, and see how far you can get. The important part is learning enough to make something useful (and being able to explain to us here what you built, what broke, and how you fixed it so that we can join you for the “ride”).
I think a “homelab” project is the starting point gives that effort somewhere to accumulate. Maybe think of it as a little digital nest where your files, tools, and accumulated knowledge can survive a company changing its business model. You can use the cloud, sure, but please have somewhere to land when “your stuff” becomes “the new subscription tier.” Start with an old PC and one problem you want to solve.
I see a great future where in very short order even the most staunchly anti-AI folks will be running AI locally on their homelab PC that’s just as curmudgeonly as they are (and that AI is evicting the manufacturer-installed spyware from your television, for example). Seems like a better future than the one we’re headed toward where you pay some combination of 5 companies to build a dossier on you that extracts as much wealth, and provides as little value to you for that extracted wealth, as possible.
The starting point and just the attitude of “willing to figure it out” – really a “willingness to confront the truth of the situation” (and change your mind if reality doesn’t fit your expectation) is the skill I most want to impart on as many people as possible.
Just Build It – have something you didn’t have before – even a failed project ends in a sense of accomplishment because you’ve at least expanded your knowledge of what didn’t work.
No idea where to start? Here are some threads worth exploring:
^ One of the best threads on the forum.
Why Homelab
Get in loser we’re remaking tech-youtube!
Homelabbing has always been a hobby of Level1. Something you can do yourself to unplug from mainstream and proprietary nonsense. Whether it’s learning about new technology and software, or repurposing what other people see as e-waste into something useful to you, homelabbing is the heart of tech YouTube and is very important to us. Feel free to use or not use our homelab videos as inspiration:
Getting Started with Homelabbing in 2026
Your Old PC Is Your Exit Plan: ft. GamersNexus
General Rules & Info.
- You may post outside of the realm of homelabbing to document progress and share your project; just be aware that we are grading and ranking these in a homelab perspective.
- If you would like to sign up for Devember, all you have to do is:
- Make a thread with the tag devember2026 in Dev Zone > Devember .
- Reply here with a link to the post you created. Tell us a bit about you and your idea or project. If applicable, you may also link your git repo or test site if you’d like to.
- If you just signed up, we may need to elevate your privileges to create new posts or add links in the appropriate categories. If that’s an issue for you, ping me @Level1_Amber .
- In your reply to this thread, include some sort of mission statement about your project, for example:
My Devember project is to learn about FygoOS by repurposing my old PC into a private storage server.
Remember to tag your project devember2026 so we can see your project and not overlook you!
AI Rules
- AI use is permitted as a tool, but vibe coding is discouraged. Vibe coding goes against the spirit of Devember, where you challenge yourself to learn something new or put your own brainpower into a project.
- Purposely lying or misrepresenting your project’s usage and/or reliance on AI will disqualify your submission at our discretion.
Perks
Upon completion of the Devember challenge, you get the Devember badge 
The winner will get a menagerie of hardware from @wendell to further their journey into homelabbing!
Need a roadmap of getting started on “The Homelab Experience” ?
Ingress and Remote Access
Get back into your homelab while you’re away, without directly exposing every service to the internet. Private VPN access and authenticated web access are different approaches; pick whichever fits the people using it.
| Project | What it does |
|---|---|
| Tailscale | Connects your devices through an encrypted private network, generally without port forwarding. An approachable way to reach your home server from your laptop or phone; the standard setup uses Tailscale’s hosted coordination service. |
| Pangolin | Combines encrypted tunnels with remote access and an authenticated reverse proxy. Useful for reaching web applications through a browser without opening inbound ports at home; you can host the public-facing server yourself. |
| NetBird | Creates a private network between your devices using WireGuard, with centralized access rules. Offers hosted management or a control plane you can run yourself. |
These support different deployment models: Pangolin’s web access still has a public entry point, where you configure authentication and access policies. Tailscale
Landing Pages
Your homelab might become a collection of different services. Give yourself one place to find them.
| Project | What it does |
|---|---|
| Homarr | A dashboard with drag-and-drop configuration, application links, and integrations that show what your services are doing. Good for building a home page the rest of the household can use. |
| Homepage | A configurable dashboard with bookmarks, system information, and widgets for your services. Configured through YAML files, which makes it convenient to keep your setup in version control. |
| Dashy | A customizable start page with application shortcuts, widgets, and status checks. Useful if you want to spend some time making your dashboard work exactly the way you like. |
Project documentation: GitHub
Home Automation and Cameras
Make the house do something useful, preferably without asking somebody else’s server for permission.
| Project | What it does |
|---|---|
| Home Assistant | Brings lights, sensors, thermostats, and other devices into one automation system, with an emphasis on local control. Start with something small, like a leak alert or lights that respond to actual occupancy. |
| Frigate | A local network video recorder with AI object detection for security cameras. Integrates with Home Assistant so “a person is at the door” can trigger something more useful than another motion notification. |
| ESPHome | Turns inexpensive microcontroller boards into custom sensors and smart devices using configuration files. A good entry point for building your own temperature monitors, buttons, and other Home Assistant gadgets. |
Project documentation: home-assistant.io ESPHome + AI helper has become an insane way to do crazy custom stuff. It’s a deep dark rabbit hole.
Files, Photos, and Paperwork
Keep the things you’d actually miss somewhere you control.
| Project | What it does |
|---|---|
| Immich | A self-hosted photo and video library with phone uploads, browsing, and search. A familiar alternative to cloud photo services, backed by storage you manage. |
| Nextcloud | File synchronization and sharing, with calendars, contacts, and an extensive collection of additional apps. Useful when you want a shared household workspace instead of several disconnected cloud accounts. |
| Paperless-ngx | Turns scans and digital documents into an organized, searchable archive using OCR, tags, and other metadata. Give receipts, warranties, and the mysterious paperwork drawer a better home. |
| Syncthing | Synchronizes folders directly between your computers without a central cloud storage provider. Handy for keeping working files available across machines; synchronization still needs a separate backup plan. |
Project documentation: Immich
Notes and Your Own Documentation
Write down how you fixed it. Future you has already forgotten.
| Project | What it does |
|---|---|
| Obsidian | A notes application built around local Markdown files, with links between notes and a large plugin ecosystem. It’s proprietary desktop/mobile software rather than a self-hosted server, but it fits well with keeping your knowledge in files you control. |
| BookStack | A self-hosted wiki organized into books, chapters, and pages, with a straightforward visual editor. A good place for homelab instructions, household documentation, and recovery procedures. |
| Memos | A lightweight, self-hosted application for short notes arranged in a timeline. Useful for capturing commands, discoveries, and project progress without writing a whole wiki page. |
Project documentation: Sharpen your thinking Zettelkasten HOOOOoooooo…
Movies, Television, and Music
Put your existing media collection to work.
| Project | What it does |
|---|---|
| Jellyfin | Organizes and streams your movies, television, and music to browsers and supported apps. Your own media server, without a subscription required to unlock its features. |
| Navidrome | A lightweight music server that makes your collection available through a browser and compatible mobile apps. A good excuse to revisit that directory of carefully collected FLAC files. |
| Sonarr | Tracks television series and automates finding, downloading, renaming, and organizing episodes through connected indexers and download clients. Handles library acquisition and organization; pair it with something like Jellyfin for playback. |
| Radarr | Does for movies what Sonarr does for television, including monitoring wanted titles and managing quality preferences. Integrates with download clients and keeps movie files organized. |
Project documentation: Jellyfin
Books, Audiobooks, and Podcasts
A library that remembers where you stopped reading.
| Project | What it does |
|---|---|
| Audiobookshelf | A self-hosted audiobook and podcast server with listening progress tracking and mobile clients. Particularly useful for keeping a large audiobook collection organized and accessible. |
| Calibre Content Server | Calibre’s built-in server lets you browse your ebook library and read books directly in a browser. A straightforward way to make an existing Calibre collection accessible around the house. |
| Calibre-Web | A separate web application for browsing, reading, and downloading books stored in a Calibre database. Adds a dedicated web interface with user accounts and library management features. |
I haven’t found something awesome here myself! I want my annotations and notes and read progress/bookmarks universally available across all devices and time and space and yet haven’t found a product that doesn’t require a subscription. Kindle almost had this! But then they enshittified.
Everyday Useful Things
Projects that might convince someone else in the house that the server is earning its electricity.
| Project | What it does |
|---|---|
| Mealie | Stores recipes, imports them from websites, and helps with meal planning and shopping lists. Keep the recipe without having to rediscover which website it came from. |
| FreshRSS | Collects RSS and Atom feeds into your own news reader. Follow websites and blogs directly, with your subscriptions and reading history on your server. |
| AdGuard Home | Provides network-wide DNS filtering to block known advertising and tracking domains. Also gives you visibility into DNS requests from devices around the house, though DNS filtering cannot block every kind of ad or tracking. |
Backups, Monitoring, and Notifications
Once you’ve built something useful, make sure you can recover it—and notice when it stops working.
| Project | What it does |
|---|---|
| Restic | Creates encrypted, deduplicated backups to local storage, remote servers, and supported cloud services. A good project for learning how to automate backups and actually test restoring them. |
| Kopia | Creates encrypted backup snapshots, with deduplication, compression, and both graphical and command-line interfaces. Useful if you want a backup system you can manage without doing everything in a terminal. |
| Uptime Kuma | Checks whether your websites and services are reachable and alerts you when they aren’t. Provides an easy dashboard for answering “is it down, or is it just me?” |
| ntfy | Sends notifications to your phone or desktop from scripts and applications, with an option to host the server yourself. Connect it to backup jobs, monitoring, or anything else that should get your attention. |
These were almost all cribbed from the other thread, but I thought deserved a special mention.
Prize Pool
store.level1techs.com – We’re going to give away stuff we have laying around the office. Parts, mostly. ASUS and others have indicated some interest in providing prizes! But I haven’t finalized that yet. Stay tuned; will update this.
We reserve the right to substitute prizes and we probably can’t ship everywhere worldwide, but we’ll try.
You will have until around the end of January to finish a project of your choice.
