About¶
Hi, I'm Jenns Paetau. I've spent over a decade in IT, most recently as a Senior SRE. I create practical guides covering everything from bare metal to cloud-native environments. Every tutorial I share is end-to-end tested on real hardware, so you know it actually works. My ultimate mission? Helping you land your first six-figure tech job.
How that actually happens¶
A lot of the gap between someone earning $60k and someone earning $150k+ in tech isn't a degree or a stack of certifications — it's hands-on operational experience with the systems real companies run, and the ability to talk about that experience cleanly in an interview. The catch is: you usually need the job to get the experience, and you need the experience to get the job.
The way out of that loop is to build the experience yourself, in a homelab, on systems you actually own and can break. That's what the guides here are for. Each one is structured so that by the end of it, you've got a working setup you can point at, talk about, and explain to anyone who asks.
How the guides work¶
Every guide is run end-to-end on real hardware before it's published — no untested commands, no "this should work on your setup" handwaving, no half-finished writeups. If something on the page is broken, it's a bug; open an issue and I'll fix it.
The content is structured around the three foundations every working system sits on — storage, networking, and compute — plus the operational categories that tie them together.
What you'll find here¶
- Kubernetes — k3s, k8s, deployments, the operational parts that don't fit into a "hello world"
- Proxmox — the open-source virtualization platform that runs most serious homelabs
- Storage — ZFS, software RAID, Ceph, GlusterFS, and keeping data alive
- Networking — VLANs, routing, DNS, firewalls, reverse proxies
- Homelab — hardware, automation, monitoring, the glue that keeps it all running
Beyond the docs¶
The written guides here are paired with video walkthroughs on YouTube — @distrodomain. Some people learn faster from watching, some from reading; both formats cover the same material so you can pick whichever works for you.
If you get stuck, want to share what you broke, or just want to hang with other people building the same kind of stuff, join the Distro Domain Discord — it's where I answer questions and where the community helps each other unstick.