Series Overview

This series documents the very real journey of building a personal, self-hosted media ecosystem around Needle — a local-first music player that slowly evolved into something much bigger.

Not because of startup ambition.
Not because of cloud-native buzzwords.
But because solving one real problem naturally exposed the next.

Along the way:

• Docker became less mysterious

• reverse proxies became unavoidable

• CGNAT revealed itself as the enemy

• HTTPS certificates suddenly appeared out of nowhere

• and a Raspberry Pi quietly transformed into a public internet service node

This series is not a polished tutorial.
It is the story of:

• architectural decisions

• wrong turns

• infrastructure discoveries

• practical debugging

• and the philosophy behind building systems you actually own.

With occasional appearances from:

• Tolkien references

• vinyl records

• coffee incidents

• and WordPress-related trauma.