Just wanted to post this here, someday it might be cool to have this regionally as well, but Sep 12-14 HomelabFest will be in St. Louis, MO (technically St. Charles, which is closer to the airport). It will include a number of homelab-related content creators, talks, a bunch of cool exhibitors (mix of community and companies in the homelab space)... hopefully a good time for all!
I meant to post this earlier but was a bit overwhelmed with all the inbound email. (Planning an event of this scale is hard, I have empathy for anyone who does it lol.)
Good to see that you gave yourself and those assisting you a year to plan and setup everything. Many people underestimate the amount of work that goes into planning this type of event and end up overwhelmed and full of last minute panic. Hope all goes well.
Yes—a year is a minimum, from all the people I talked to—and I've already spent about six months prior setting up everything I could pre-announcement. I have a lot of respect for anyone who puts on an event, of any size.
For those who don't watch his YouTube channel or read his blog, Jeff is a fantastic spokesperson for for everything self hosting (enjoying the NTP binge of late!). I really hope this is a success as he's an excellent advocate for a healthy and positive community and framework of understanding this stuff, not to mention his quality as an orator. It would be great to see a cultural push back against surveillance capitalism and centralization of compute and we need good voices and responsible advocates sharing their thoughts to those learning the ropes.
> he's an excellent advocate for a healthy and positive community
The reactions about this when announced on Reddit seem to contradict that:
> I'm a little disappointed that u/geerlingguy is the one running it, since he's posted some shitty beliefs about gay people that, to my knowledge, he has never retracted or disavowed.
> So he can tell all the women there they have no right to their own body?
> Hmmm I didn't know Jeff was anti-gay and anti-women's rights.
> Hi u/geerlingguy ! Are gay people allowed to attend your event?
I wasn't aware he's publicly said anything like this, but I've always assumed he was quite religious so I'm not particularly surprised.
To be fair, this is a pretty tame and measured expression of disapproval of the modern societal acceptance of homosexuality. I honestly don't know what more I could ask for, in modern societal discourse, for someone I disagree with in terms of how they go about expressing it: the links I read seem to imply he was honest, polite, and clear on his feelings, not inciting hate, violence, or spewing vitriol. Jeff's views are his own, and maybe the crux here is that I don't see politely disagreeing about the righteousness of living homosexually as remotely severe enough to warrant this much attention considering the quality of character of a lot of public figures visible to those of us outside the USA.
I admit seeing a response like this irks me as I feel it needlessly detracts from the mission. That said, it's both A) fair and a good thing to judge and critique any public figure's character and I do think public figures and their views deserve scrutiny, and B) a means to continue to allow powerful people and groups to assassinate the character of and dilute the message of people who run contrary to their goals. I'm genuinely torn on how to feel about how to feel here. I worry we allow ideas to be discarded at the first sign of something we disapprove of in people who share them -which is wrong-, yet several of my best friends are queer and I also could not stand to see them trod upon. Those same queer friends all have views and personality flaws which would be judged just as harshly by others.
Regardless, I don't like you using my excerpt that way. Not everyone's views of "community" mean the classic cancel culture era idiosyncratic definition whereby anyone in any role remotely resembling leadership must share the same specific set of homogeneous views on political and cultural issues to be given any member's "consent" to lead a group. I stand by what I said and still do believe Jeff is an excellent advocate for these ideas. There are obvious limits, to be clear, I would never go to Toastmasters if the local club head spoke about killing jews, but this isn't that and IMO there are so, so many more important battles to go fight out there than this.
The guy has an obvious conflict of interest - running a youtube channel/taking sponsorships. I've never undestood why so many people take his word at face value. It's at best attempts to manufacture hype for views and at worst shilling for whoever gave him money to shill for them (i.e. qualcomm buying arduino is good actually)
Just to be clear, I've never taken a dime from Qualcomm, Apple, Raspberry Pi, etc—when I do take a sponsorship from any company I'm clear about it.
I always mark videos as sponsored if anything was provided (eg review samples) and not purchased. That never includes payments or editorial oversight, and equipment is either returned or shelved afterwards for future comparisons.
Hmm. I follow a few topics on HN out of curiosity. I think I know what ‘homelabbing’ is, but there’s no explanation. Everyone likes a secret society when they’re in it.
I was scrolling on my phone while drinking my first coffee. I make no apologies for my inability to read more than one sentence at a time.
That said, why not put something in the navigation, like an About page? And why isn't this description in the FAQ? Two things I looked for and didn't find (or would have if I had read the second sentence.
I’m vaguely aware of the dude having removed a lot of rubbish ansible roles which I think he wrote over the years, and now he’s some kind of blogger or something?
He’s not a technical person, sysadmin cosplay aside — and so I think, at least here, we should only judge technical contributions; of which his is a handful of yaml files for installing apache which don’t really count for much.
Religious types are never happy in doing only what they say and believe - they want to force these views on others, whether they like it or not. I've seen what religious imperialism does. These choices are not personal and will never be personal.
Worse yet, when you allow SOME types of hate (against women and against homosexuals), it opens the door for other hate. This is Catholic teachings, so are non-Catholics welcome? How about Jews? Moslems? How about pagans and witches? Are bisexuals welcome, since they are half-homosexual?
When you refuse to draw the line at hate, but draw it where you find it convenient, you leave the door open for hate to sneak in everywhere, under the guise of tolerating intolerance.
I put my foot down at any form of hate. Attending, paying, or otherwise supporting this event is tacit acceptance that his form of hate is acceptable.
Just wanted to post this here, someday it might be cool to have this regionally as well, but Sep 12-14 HomelabFest will be in St. Louis, MO (technically St. Charles, which is closer to the airport). It will include a number of homelab-related content creators, talks, a bunch of cool exhibitors (mix of community and companies in the homelab space)... hopefully a good time for all!
I meant to post this earlier but was a bit overwhelmed with all the inbound email. (Planning an event of this scale is hard, I have empathy for anyone who does it lol.)
Is there an agenda or list of speakers posted? Maybe I missed it on the site?
https://www.homelabfest.org/creators/
Agenda won't be up until a CFP is over, but there will be 10-20 sessions including a few panels.
I've just got into your videos and they are really excellent. If only I were in the US I might come along.
(Currently adding Flux so my Gitlab k8s things auto-apply to my Homelab. No such thing as too much overkill.)
Looking forward to it, also good luck!
Good to see that you gave yourself and those assisting you a year to plan and setup everything. Many people underestimate the amount of work that goes into planning this type of event and end up overwhelmed and full of last minute panic. Hope all goes well.
Yes—a year is a minimum, from all the people I talked to—and I've already spent about six months prior setting up everything I could pre-announcement. I have a lot of respect for anyone who puts on an event, of any size.
Further discussion (un-moderated):
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1wq04et/im_startin...
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1wq2orh/jeff_ge...
Please don't reference that pit of doom for anything.
Every platform has its flaws, including HN.
For those who don't watch his YouTube channel or read his blog, Jeff is a fantastic spokesperson for for everything self hosting (enjoying the NTP binge of late!). I really hope this is a success as he's an excellent advocate for a healthy and positive community and framework of understanding this stuff, not to mention his quality as an orator. It would be great to see a cultural push back against surveillance capitalism and centralization of compute and we need good voices and responsible advocates sharing their thoughts to those learning the ropes.
> he's an excellent advocate for a healthy and positive community
The reactions about this when announced on Reddit seem to contradict that:
etc.
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1wq04et/im_startin...
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1wq2orh/jeff_ge...
I wasn't aware he's publicly said anything like this, but I've always assumed he was quite religious so I'm not particularly surprised.
To be fair, this is a pretty tame and measured expression of disapproval of the modern societal acceptance of homosexuality. I honestly don't know what more I could ask for, in modern societal discourse, for someone I disagree with in terms of how they go about expressing it: the links I read seem to imply he was honest, polite, and clear on his feelings, not inciting hate, violence, or spewing vitriol. Jeff's views are his own, and maybe the crux here is that I don't see politely disagreeing about the righteousness of living homosexually as remotely severe enough to warrant this much attention considering the quality of character of a lot of public figures visible to those of us outside the USA.
I admit seeing a response like this irks me as I feel it needlessly detracts from the mission. That said, it's both A) fair and a good thing to judge and critique any public figure's character and I do think public figures and their views deserve scrutiny, and B) a means to continue to allow powerful people and groups to assassinate the character of and dilute the message of people who run contrary to their goals. I'm genuinely torn on how to feel about how to feel here. I worry we allow ideas to be discarded at the first sign of something we disapprove of in people who share them -which is wrong-, yet several of my best friends are queer and I also could not stand to see them trod upon. Those same queer friends all have views and personality flaws which would be judged just as harshly by others.
Regardless, I don't like you using my excerpt that way. Not everyone's views of "community" mean the classic cancel culture era idiosyncratic definition whereby anyone in any role remotely resembling leadership must share the same specific set of homogeneous views on political and cultural issues to be given any member's "consent" to lead a group. I stand by what I said and still do believe Jeff is an excellent advocate for these ideas. There are obvious limits, to be clear, I would never go to Toastmasters if the local club head spoke about killing jews, but this isn't that and IMO there are so, so many more important battles to go fight out there than this.
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Many churches believe they have a “healthy and positive” community along with their constituents while espousing those same views.
A community can simultaneously be healthy and positive while being politically disagreeable to others.
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The guy has an obvious conflict of interest - running a youtube channel/taking sponsorships. I've never undestood why so many people take his word at face value. It's at best attempts to manufacture hype for views and at worst shilling for whoever gave him money to shill for them (i.e. qualcomm buying arduino is good actually)
Just to be clear, I've never taken a dime from Qualcomm, Apple, Raspberry Pi, etc—when I do take a sponsorship from any company I'm clear about it.
I always mark videos as sponsored if anything was provided (eg review samples) and not purchased. That never includes payments or editorial oversight, and equipment is either returned or shelved afterwards for future comparisons.
The only thing I accept money for is clearly demarcated ad integrations, like for Micro Center or Surfshark. See https://github.com/geerlingguy/youtube#sponsorships for details.
If I wanted to hype views I would not be sinking a few thousand hours into planning an event ;)
Brother, you are preaching to simonw's audience, what do you expect.
Sounds like fun. I wish there were something like this in the UK. Though we do have some pretty cool events like EMF Camp.
Hmm. I follow a few topics on HN out of curiosity. I think I know what ‘homelabbing’ is, but there’s no explanation. Everyone likes a secret society when they’re in it.
The first paragraph on the page seems pretty descriptive?
I was scrolling on my phone while drinking my first coffee. I make no apologies for my inability to read more than one sentence at a time.
That said, why not put something in the navigation, like an About page? And why isn't this description in the FAQ? Two things I looked for and didn't find (or would have if I had read the second sentence.
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That’s cool. I hope this succeeds
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What does a personal politics matter?
I’m vaguely aware of the dude having removed a lot of rubbish ansible roles which I think he wrote over the years, and now he’s some kind of blogger or something?
He’s not a technical person, sysadmin cosplay aside — and so I think, at least here, we should only judge technical contributions; of which his is a handful of yaml files for installing apache which don’t really count for much.
Totally agree. These responses I expect to see on reddit alone and why I stopped viewing reddit years ago.
Should I be comfortable going to this event if I'm queer? Is there a benefit to excluding queer people from this event?
I like this idea and hope someone else is inspired to run a more inclusive event.
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Personal choices:
"I don't eat meat."
"I won't have an abortion."
"I pray 5x a day."
"I won't be homosexual."
Versus religious coersion of:
"You cannot eat meat."
"You cannot have an abortion."
"You must pray 5x a day."
"You cannot be homosexual."
Religious types are never happy in doing only what they say and believe - they want to force these views on others, whether they like it or not. I've seen what religious imperialism does. These choices are not personal and will never be personal.
Worse yet, when you allow SOME types of hate (against women and against homosexuals), it opens the door for other hate. This is Catholic teachings, so are non-Catholics welcome? How about Jews? Moslems? How about pagans and witches? Are bisexuals welcome, since they are half-homosexual?
When you refuse to draw the line at hate, but draw it where you find it convenient, you leave the door open for hate to sneak in everywhere, under the guise of tolerating intolerance.
I put my foot down at any form of hate. Attending, paying, or otherwise supporting this event is tacit acceptance that his form of hate is acceptable.
Frankly, personal politics matter a great deal to me. I can't look away.
I don't support people who advocate for policies that hurt and kill people (mostly women in this case). That cause tremendous suffering.
I can't support such people in any way, even if their personal politics have nothing to do with their work or whatever event they plan.
People can believe and support what they want, but they should not be free of consequences for such beliefs: exclusion and boycots.
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> What does a personal politics matter?
Not a lot. But being anti <X> and letting anyone know is imposing your views on others.
Vouched, cause I wasn't aware of this.
Citations are here: https://louwrentius.com/jeff-geerling-is-anti-abortion-again...
Hate is hate, and religion is just the excuse.
I considered attending, given I'm only 4 hours driving away. But I wont support hate like this. We need less hatred, not more in this world.
Pass.
Disclosure: I wrote that blog post but with sources.