ABOUT DRAKELABS
Curiosity,
with a workbench.
DrakeLabs is my home for building, running, and understanding technology — and for sharing the work that makes it all fit together.
HOW IT STARTED
It started with streaming fatigue.
I hadn’t planned on building a project this big. I was tired of paying for multiple streaming services and wanted to collect and organize my own media for myself and my family.
I wanted a library we could keep, without a streaming service deciding to remove a favorite show or movie. One familiar interface for everything, with control over the environment behind it.
WHY DOCUMENT IT
A bigger project.
A lot of learning.
As the setup grew, so did the work involved in making it all fit together. What began as a practical family project became a place to learn by building and running real systems. I started with very little Linux experience; Ubuntu became my OS of choice, and along the way I became confident working in the command line.
DrakeLabs is a way to document that work for myself and showcase what I’ve learned: the choices, the troubleshooting, and the improvements along the way.
Explore the goals behind the lab →THE APPROACH
Make the learning visible.
A useful portfolio should show more than a finished screen. It should explain the question, the constraints, and the choices behind the result.
This site starts with a family media system and grows from there. The aim is a record of practical work, with enough context to be useful to someone else.
Understand the pieces.
02 / DOCUMENT THE CHOICESKeep the reasoning.
03 / KEEP ITERATINGLeave room to improve.
BUILDING IN THE OPEN
Show the process, too.
The earlier lab was built and configured by me, with AI helping with research and Bash and Python scripts that I manually reviewed. Direct implementation by AI agents is a recent addition to the process, including this website.
I want readers to see both the progress and how the work was done — and eventually have a straightforward, tested path to build their own version.
WHAT COMES NEXT
A public home, when it’s ready.
The intended domain is drakelabs.org. A dedicated GitHub organization is planned, but no organization ownership or repository availability is assumed here.
Explore the work →