My partner and I bought our house in 2019 and it very quickly became obvious that the basement lights were awful. There are six lights, two per switch with one switch at the top of the stairs, one near the ceiling behind a bar, and one on the opposite side of the room. It was annoying trying to turn all the lights on or off without tripping over anything, so we quickly bought some Hue bulbs to be able to use voice commands with Google Home to control the lights.

At some point in the last few years, I became interested in self-hosted services, probably via r/homelab and r/homeserver. It serves two purposes: a hobby and a way to have useful things with less reliance on big tech companies. Because it’s a hobby, setting up new services or improving my environment don’t always feel like work. It’s frustrating when there are issues, but the process of troubleshooting and getting the whole setup working is mostly fun.