As a software engineer with over a decade of experience, I spend most of my professional life building things on top of infrastructure someone else owns and controls. At some point I started asking myself an uncomfortable question: how much of my own personal data — my passwords, my family photos, my private notes — was sitting on servers I had no real control over, governed by terms of service I'd never fully read? That question is what got this project started.
I wanted a private cloud that was actually mine: encrypted, self-hosted, and built with the same engineering rigor I'd apply to production systems at work. It's also selfishly been a great excuse to get hands-on with infrastructure I don't normally touch day-to-day — reverse proxies, mutual TLS, hardened networking — while building something genuinely useful for me and my family.
The whole thing runs on a lightweight ARM-based cloud server, orchestrated through a self-hosted PaaS (Coolify) with Traefik handling reverse proxying and TLS termination. On top of that sits a set of privacy-first, mostly open-source applications:
The result is a setup I trust with my own data day to day — hardened, documented, and built with the same rigor I'd apply to a production system at work.