About

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hey you… You came to my place, let me introduce myself!

I’m Carlos Garrote and I live in Lisbon, Portugal.

I’m a software engineering student at 42 Lisboa (C, C++, Linux, networking), and at home I’m building my cloud/infrastructure career the hands-on way with several experiments on my Home Lab.

Career changer

Before tech, I spent 15+ years in professional music: gigging, touring, coordinating a multi-school creative songwriting program for 250+ students a year, teaching in challenging environments, and performing nightly on cruise ships.

Home Lab

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My home lab is where I do my learning!

It consists of a Linux server on repurposed hardware — an old laptop running a multi-service Docker stack that I use every day: media, music, and a document pipeline.

It’s the real system behind “I break things on my own server so nothing breaks on a production one.”

Right Now

 ┌────────────────────────────┐
 laptop/desktop │ HOME SERVER │
 ─────────────── │ Debian 12 - old laptop │
 │ │
 SSH (LAN) ────────▶│ Docker ┌───────────────┐ │
 SSH over Tailscale ────▶│ │ Jellyfin │ │
 │ │ Navidrome │ │
 │ │ Stirling-PDF │ │
 │ │ Downtify │ │
 │ └───────────────┘ │
 │ systemd · UFW │
 └─────────────┬──────────────┘
 │ rsync
 ▼
 config & document backups

Services

Running right now (Oct 2026)

Jellyfin - media server, streaming my tv shows and movies library
Navidrome - music streaming server, that I connect to using an Android client app called Reasonus (kind of a Spotify clone)
Stirling-PDF - a great PDF toolbox complement to the cli-tool pdfunite
Downtify - because sometimes it makes sense to store music locally

Other useful apps, not containerized

docling - document parsing pipeline (converting pdfs or yt videos to md has been great for learning!)
yt-dlp - also, because sometimes it’s easier to digest content if they’re stored locally
ollama - testing small local models. wouldn’t it be nice to run local AI models on your consumer devices?
rsync - great tool for copying and syncing between devices inside the same network (or even the same device. it’s such a powerfull cp command!)

Apps I tried in the past

OpenCloud and NextCloud - in the search for finding a great file sync and sharing between devices
Syncthing - same quest as mentioned before (sync across devices)
Immich - Self-hosted photo library, a replacement for Google Photos
Paperless-ng - I dream on having this service properly setup and fully functional for my needs
Pi-hole - I messed up a few times with this. It blocks ads and tracker but it might affect other users on your network (still need to configure it properly)
Portainer - it was great to see in a clean web page all the container management, but then I forced myself to be in the CLI

What it taught me

Linux administration (systemd, users, permissions, UFW firewall)
Remote administration over SSH or SSH via Tailscale — no exposed ports
Docker networking and volumes
Full container lifecycle: updates, permissions, and health in my hands
Backups of configuration and documents kept in sync with rsync
Shell scripting for automation
Backup strategies and cron jobs

extending the lab with Terraform and Kubernetes
testing Podman as a Docker alternative
evaluating AWS vs Azure as my first cloud target.

Projects

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Home Lab

Self-hosted infrastructure — Linux, Docker, Bash

Linux server on repurposed hardware running a multi-service Docker stack for daily use (media, photos, file sync, document pipeline), administered remotely over SSH and backed up with rsync. Full write-up

set_deb12

Automated Debian 12 provisioning — Bash, Docker, i3

Scripted setup that turns a fresh Debian 12 VM into a fully provisioned workstation in one pass: package installs, Docker Engine, and i3/tmux/vim/alacritty dotfiles. Solved real toolchain-compatibility work — bridging GCC differences between daily Fedora (GCC 15) and 42 school systems (Ubuntu 22.04, GCC 11) for C graphics projects. The tuned VM profile boots using ~200–230MB RAM, leaving full resources for compilation workloads.

Carlos Garrote

About

Hey you… You came to my place, let me introduce myself!

Career changer

Home Lab

Right Now

Services

Running right now (Oct 2026)

Other useful apps, not containerized

Apps I tried in the past

What it taught me

Next

Projects

Home Lab

set_deb12