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