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When I was a kid, my home lab consisted of test tubes and beakers, sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), acetic acid (vinegar), and the occasional boom, followed closely by the sound of my mom in the distance yelling, "David Allen Gewirtz, you stop that right now."
When the scold transitioned from "David Gewirtz" to "David Allen Gewirtz," I knew I was in trouble. To be fair, nothing prepared my nontechnical mom and dad to raise a future engineer. I was forever taking things apart, blowing things up, lighting things on fire, combining previously working appliances into not entirely working proto-robots, and otherwise doing science they were ill-prepared to either understand or manage.
Today, however, when we talk about a home lab, we're talking about something far less combustible: a home server that people can use to create an at-home data center and experimental IT laboratory.
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All it takes is an old PC and a Linux distro. My home lab consists of a bunch of out-of-service Intel-based Mac minis loaded up with Debian and running a pile of Docker containers. I haven't done so yet, but one of my near-term home lab projects will be to dedicate a Mac mini to running a series of local AI LLMs for experimentation. It would also be nice to use an AI without it running home and reporting everything to Big Brother at OpenAI, Redmond, or Google.
Helping you land that IT job
I like using my home lab for project experimentation. But what I really want to stress in this article is how helpful a home lab can be for you if you're looking for a job in IT. Let's look at 10 ways a home lab can help.
1. Hands-on experience
When I left engineering school, I had a number of big projects under my belt. I've always been a project-oriented person. That was the case in college as well. When I first hit the job market, I was competing against a lot of other engineering graduates. Many of the hiring managers were wary of new graduates with no experience.
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