Hi, I'm Matteo.
I'm an Industrial Engineering student with a habit of turning small technical ideas into much bigger projects.
I spend a lot of my free time experimenting with homelabs, networking, smart homes, self-hosting, local AI and whatever technical rabbit hole catches my attention next.
What I enjoy most is not simply getting something to work. I like understanding why it works, what happens when it breaks, and how the pieces fit together. A project might start with installing a service on a Raspberry Pi and somehow end with VLANs, databases, monitoring, backups, Python or an AI agent.
Most of what I know in this space came from building things myself, reading documentation, following other people's projects, breaking my own setup and then figuring out how to fix it.
This website is where I document that process.
How I got into this
I have always been drawn to understanding how things work and figuring out how to build or improve them.
That became much more concrete during high school, where I followed Technological Sciences. It was the kind of education that suited me extremely well: mathematics, physics, electronics, technology and solving technical problems all came together.
I was also lucky to have a fantastic teacher who taught me an enormous amount. More importantly, he gave me the opportunity to actually turn ideas into something real. Instead of technology only being something I was interested in, it became something I could experiment with, build and understand for myself.
Looking back, I think that period gave me a lot of the mindset I still use today. I like starting with a problem or an idea, understanding the principles behind it and then seeing whether I can make it work in practice.
By 2024, that interest had started moving beyond school projects and into things I was building entirely for myself. I was watching a lot of NetworkChuck and other technical content about Raspberry Pis, Linux, networking and self-hosting, and I started experimenting at home with Raspberry Pis and small services.
One of the first things I set up that became genuinely useful was AdGuard Home. It was a relatively small project, but it introduced me to Linux, DNS, networking, remote management and the idea of running my own infrastructure.
When I moved into student housing later that year, I wanted to take things further. In November 2024, I built the PC that would become my Ubuntu homelab server. That gave me a proper machine where I could experiment with Docker, self-hosted applications, storage, networking and whatever else I wanted to learn.
From there, one project kept leading into another. At home I started digging deeper into our Niko Home Control installation and Home Assistant. That pulled me into smart-home automation, sensors, energy data and eventually projects such as Home Intelligence.
In 2025, I started studying Industrial Engineering at university. By then, the homelab had already become a big part of how I learned outside of school: not as an assignment, but because I genuinely enjoyed building things and understanding them.
The setup has kept growing ever since. What started with Raspberry Pis and a few tutorials gradually turned into servers, VLANs, databases, backups, smart-home systems, local AI, agents and dedicated infrastructure projects.
I never really planned the whole thing in advance. Most of it grew one project at a time — and that is still how I like working today.