Raspberry Pis have played a big part of my learning and home lab experience, it was my first step into self hosting things. I began with installing PiOS and looked for ways to put it to use.

In the place I used to rent I only had one ethernet cable to my room and that was it, so I used to have a wifi Router but than wanted to test out more, so I tried to do what any nerd would to. Try to create my own router, I decided to use OpenWRT and use it on my Pi. I was not happy with the results so for Router I did something else which is shared in another post(PfSense).

So than it was downgraded to projects as a part of my network. First one was installing docker and portainer.

Docker was interesting to install, there are two ways to install docker on the Raspberry Pi's ARM CPU architecture

so you have to install the Debian installation to make it work on 64 bits, which only the latest models use.

Than I installed portainer and some other services but this was my intial work with the Raspberry PI

some things I hosted on Raspberry Pis

AdGuard Home – To block ads and trackers at the network level.
Home Assistant – My first attempt at smart home automation before I moved it to a more powerful machine.
Cloudflare tunnel & Twingate – For secure remote access to my home lab.
Grafana & InfluxDB – To monitor system performance and network stats.
ELK Stack (later moved) – I initially experimented with using a Raspberry Pi for logging, but it wasn’t powerful enough for large-scale log management.
Redis - for session management and data caching
Wordpress - for a website
This website(xD) - I host it using ghost
LLama - fun experiment for LLM
Prometheus - for data scraping and monitoring
Portainer - for container management
Elastic Agent - for an ELK stack

Overall it has been a big part of my learning procces, it included a lot of fresh OS installations and reading but I love the Pis. Afterwards I got a second one and did a project with Docker Swarm and afterwards a third one and this project about Kubernetes.