first version of the knowledge base :)

00 - About/about-hidden-den.md

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+---
+title: About Hidden Den
+description: Overview of Hidden Den as a self-hosted engineering environment focused on privacy, durability, and human-scale infrastructure
+tags:
+  - about
+  - homelab
+  - infrastructure
+category: about
+created: 2026-03-14
+updated: 2026-03-14
+---
+
+# About Hidden Den
+
+## Summary
+
+Hidden Den is a self-hosted engineering environment centered on privacy, technical autonomy, durability, and human-scale infrastructure. It combines homelab systems, open source tooling, and practical DevOps workflows into a platform for running services, testing ideas, and documenting repeatable engineering patterns in a way that stays understandable over time.
+
+## Why it matters
+
+Many engineers operate personal infrastructure but leave the reasoning behind their systems undocumented or let it drift into a collection of tools without a clear operating model. Hidden Den exists to make the architecture, tradeoffs, and operating practices explicit while keeping the environment calm, maintainable, and fully owned by its operator.
+
+## Core concepts
+
+- Self-hosting as a way to understand and control critical services
+- Privacy as both a philosophy and an implementation requirement
+- Durable systems that can be migrated, backed up, repaired, and replaced
+- Small, composable systems instead of opaque all-in-one stacks
+- Documentation as part of the system, not separate from it
+- Human-scale design that keeps technology legible and understandable
+
+## Practical usage
+
+Within the Hidden Den ecosystem, infrastructure topics typically include:
+
+- Private access using VPN or zero-trust networking
+- Virtualization and container workloads
+- Reverse proxies, DNS, and service discovery
+- Monitoring, backups, and update management
+- Tooling that can be reproduced on standard Linux-based infrastructure
+- Static or low-dependency publishing patterns when they reduce operational drag
+
+## Best practices
+
+- Prefer documented systems over convenient but fragile one-off fixes
+- Keep infrastructure services understandable enough to rebuild
+- Choose open standards and open source tools where practical
+- Treat access control, backup, and observability as core services
+- Favor warm, legible, low-friction systems over polished but opaque stacks
+
+## Pitfalls
+
+- Adding too many overlapping tools without a clear ownership model
+- Relying on memory instead of written operational notes
+- Exposing administrative services publicly when a private access layer is sufficient
+- Allowing convenience to override maintainability
+- Optimizing for image, novelty, or feature count instead of long-term operability
+
+## References
+
+- [The Twelve-Factor App](https://12factor.net/)
+- [Tailscale: What is Tailscale?](https://tailscale.com/kb/1151/what-is-tailscale)
+- [Docker: Docker overview](https://docs.docker.com/get-started/docker-overview/)
+- [Proxmox VE Administration Guide](https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/)