I grew up in Dhaka during the late 1980s and early 90s. Back then, life was a lot slower. Most kids played cricket in the streets or spent time roaming around the alleys. But I was always a bit different. I always wanted to know how things worked "under the hood."
Before I had a computer or a home lab, I played with old electronics. I looked for broken radios or old Black & White CRT TVs. To most people, a broken TV was just trash. To me, it was a mystery to solve. I loved taking them apart to see what was inside.
I still remember the smell of dust and old metal when I opened a plastic case. The green circuit boards looked like maps of a tiny city. I would move my finger along the lines on the board. I wondered how a signal moved through the wires to show a picture or play sound. I did not know how to fix them yet, but I loved trying to understand the logic. I tried to fix them; most of the time I learned something new, and sometimes I succeeded. Basically, I never had a failure, because I always learned something.
Today, I have a DevOps home lab at my house. It has servers, Docker, and Proxmox. My toys are now virtual machines and code. The feeling is exactly the same when I get a new service to work. I feel the same joy I felt as a young boy in Dhaka. My childhood taught me how to solve problems. Whether it is an old TV or a modern server, I still love to discover how things work.
Looking back, those broken radios or CRT Tvs were just my first servers, and my homelab today is simply a bigger version of the mystery I've been solving since I was a boy in old Dhaka. My journey started with a screwdriver and a dream, and it comtinues today with a keyboard and a container.