Closing the 100 Days

Hey folks, it's been a while since I've written anything here.

I started the 100 Days of Homelab challenge back in January 2025. Made it to Day 39, then stopped.

Now it's 2026 and I figured I should close this out properly before moving on.

When I started, I'd already been tinkering for a couple of months. The challenge was meant to force documentation, to stop just doing things and actually write about them.

Finding things to write about wasn't the issue. The issue was that posting "still stress testing my NAS" or "still debugging why this secret won't decrypt" felt like nothing much.

The work wasn't done yet, so the writing felt inconsequential.

There's also the reality of finishing something at 11pm and choosing between writing about it or going to bed because work exists tomorrow.

Bed usually won.

Some people write fast and can bang out a post in 20 minutes (at least in my head that's the perception). That's not me. Turning my rough notes into something readable takes time I didn't always have.

So I grouped days. "Day 5-6" then "Day 11-12". Then weeks would pass because forcing out something half-baked felt pointless.

Thinking about it, I think it's similar to journaling. Some people can journal daily and it works.

I've journaled for five years but only when I feel like it. Daily never stuck. Same angle here. Forcing the cadence created friction that eventually won.

Most of those posts did become very useful references though. Especially Talos extensions guide, joining non-Talos nodes to a Talos cluster.

But 39 days over 6 months isn't 100 days, but it wasn't nothing either, so: series closed.

I'm not stopping writing though. Just dropping the daily format, that I felt guilty not following.

See this post covering a year of building, rebuilding, and what actually changed.