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About Us

Create, Innovate, Explore started in a closet, next to the water heater, in a fourteenth-floor apartment where the fan noise from a single mini-PC could be heard from the couch. It's grown since then — but the closet is still there, and most of what you'll read on this site was learned in it.

What this place is

Create, Innovate, Explore is an independent homelab journal. Self-hosting, small-infra DevOps, rack builds, and the networking that ties them together. Written for the kind of operator who reads the config file before running the installer.

What you will find here:

  • Field notes from the rack — real commands, real config files, real failure modes. If something breaks on my setup, it's in the writeup.
  • Benchmarks you can reproduce — hardware tested on a single machine in a single apartment, not scraped from vendor marketing.
  • Long-form essays, not listicles — most posts are 1,200+ words. A thing worth running is worth understanding before you run it.
  • Evergreen, maintained — articles get updated when the software does. If a guide is out of date, it gets a note at the top.

Who's behind it

Hi — I'm Theo Marren. I've been running homelabs out of closets and corners of small apartments for about eight years. Started with a Raspberry Pi doing DNS-level ad blocking because I got tired of seeing the same eight banner ads on every page. Worked my way up through an old ThinkCentre, then a used Dell R220, then the current setup — a single Proxmox host running Immich, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Nextcloud, the *arr stack, and about a dozen other services, all reachable over Tailscale from anywhere I happen to be.

I am not a full-time infrastructure engineer. I do this on weekends, evenings, and the occasional Tuesday when I should be doing something else. That means every guide on Create, Innovate, Explore is written from the perspective of someone who has a day job and a partner who would very much like the closet door closed.

I write everything you read here. I run every service for at least a month in production — on my actual rack, with my actual family relying on it — before it gets a writeup. That rules out a lot of shiny new projects. It also means when a post goes up, it's because the thing actually works.

How we work

Create, Innovate, Explore is reader-supported. There are exactly three ways this site makes money, and none of them compromise what gets published:

  • Affiliate links on gear I actually own — if you buy a recommended piece of hardware through one of our links, we earn a small commission. The links are on things sitting in my rack right now. Full affiliate disclosure.
  • Dispatch, the weekly newsletter — free, one email every Sunday, one-click unsubscribe at the top. Field notes that don't make the main site.
  • Display ads, carefully — on a small subset of posts, served by a network with strict quality filters. No pop-ups, no autoplay video, no interstitials, no cookie walls.

What Create, Innovate, Explore does not do, and will never do: accept guest posts from SEO agencies, publish AI-generated content, run sponsored articles without clear disclosure, or put anything between you and the content you came for.

What's next

I'm building this slowly and on purpose. New essays go up most weeks. The topic queue runs about twelve deep and is driven by what I'm actually debugging on the rack.

If you want to follow along, the Dispatch newsletter is the best way. If you want to send corrections, suggest topics, or argue about virtualization platforms, the contact page is right there.

Thanks for reading.

— Theo