Stop Learning Tech Only From Books (Do This Instead)
Who I am, what you'll find on this channel, and how we'll go from theory to real labs, starting with an old PC.
There’s a huge difference between knowing how something works and having made it work. You can explain what an IP address is, what a firewall is for or what a hypervisor does, and still go blank in front of an empty terminal. It isn’t a lack of ability: theory alone doesn’t prepare you for that moment.
It’s like learning to swim by reading a book. You can know the technique by heart, but what you really learn, you learn in the water. And in tech, that moment of jumping in usually comes at the worst time: in a technical interview or at your first job.
This article goes with the first video on my channel. I’ll tell you who I am, what you’ll find here, and how we’ll go from theory to real labs you can build at home.
In this video
- Why learning networking, Linux or servers from theory alone falls short.
- Who I am and why I’m starting this channel.
- The channel’s three topics: artificial intelligence, security and tech.
- What’s next: Homelab From Scratch, and what your old PC needs to get started.
Who’s writing this
My name is Luis Jaramillo, but people call me Lucho. I’m from Colombia, and I’ve been building software for companies since 2015. Today I work as a software architect, although most of my day is still writing code and solving engineering problems.
There’s something I enjoy as much as software: having my own infrastructure. Servers running at home, at a low cost, that I configure and secure myself, where I know where my information is and who can see it. That sense of control, in private, is what led me to build my own lab, and it’s what I want to share with you.
Why I’m starting this channel
I want to explain tech concepts in a simple way and, above all, show you what I do and what works for me so you can replicate it. Not as a list of commands to copy without understanding them, but as labs where you see the engineering working and understand why each step is there.
The channel revolves around three topics.
Artificial intelligence, applied to real processes and recorded from start to finish, not in five-second demos. For example: using AI to analyze the vulnerabilities of my own website.
Security, always from the defensive side: how to protect your servers and your network, tested in my own lab.
Tech, which covers servers, networks, homelabs and the tools I work with every day, like Obsidian, where I keep everything I learn.
How you’ll learn here
You don’t need to be an expert. If you know the basics, you can follow every video. You’ll see everything on my screen, working, and I’ll explain every command I use. The commands and configuration files will be on GitHub, so you don’t have to copy them by pausing the video and you can build it yourself.
There’s a new video every week, recorded in Spanish with an English audio track (on YouTube, switch it in ⚙️ Settings → Audio track). And every video has a written guide like this one, so you can come back to it while you build your own lab.
The first lab: that old PC you have stored away
To really practice, you don’t need a data center or to pay for the cloud. Most likely you already have what it takes: an old desktop PC stored away in some corner of your house.
That’s how the channel’s first series starts: Homelab From Scratch. We’re going to bring an old PC back to life and install Proxmox on it, a virtualization platform that lets you run several virtual servers inside a single machine. Every service we set up in the series will live in its own virtual machine or container, so the lab can grow video by video without breaking what came before.
I’m going to use an HP ProLiant that had been sitting in a corner for years, with more dust than RAM. But you don’t need a server like that one: an old desktop PC works, as long as it meets a few minimum requirements.
Before the next video: check your PC
According to the official Proxmox VE documentation, this is what you need:
- A 64-bit processor (Intel 64 or AMD64) with hardware virtualization, Intel VT or AMD-V. Both the processor and the motherboard must support it, and you almost always have to enable it in the BIOS or UEFI.
- RAM: Proxmox recommends at least 2 GB for the system and its services, plus the RAM you want to give your virtual servers. 1 GB is only enough to try it out.
- A disk to install it on. An SSD is much better.
- A network card.
In the next video I’ll show you how to check whether yours qualifies and how to start the installation. If there’s a topic you’d like to see built in a video, leave it in the YouTube comments.
Resources & references
Chapters
- 00:00 Theory vs. practice
- 00:31 Who I am and why this channel
- 01:07 What you’ll find here: AI, Security, Tech
- 01:37 How this channel works
- 02:03 Homelab From Scratch: what’s next
Code
- 💻 Lab commands and files: https://github.com/itslucho-com