What is Weekend Hacks?
A personal site documenting my journey of replacing cloud subscriptions and vendor locked hardware with open source, self hosted alternatives I actually own and control. Not a tutorial site. Not a review site. Just an honest account of what I am building, what I am learning, and what is worth knowing about.
Longer than I expected when I thought about it. My first home server was a NAS I built in the late 2000s, early in my career, mainly for home storage. After that I drifted heavily into software and left the hardware side behind for years. Coming back to it recently through Home Assistant and rediscovering Raspberry Pis felt like picking up something I had always meant to return to. I spent a good chunk of my younger years playing with Arduinos and building my own computers, so the instinct was always there. It just needed the right spark to come back.
No. The purpose of Weekend Hacks is to show what is achievable, share resources, and signpost things worth exploring. I do not always know what I am doing when I start a project and I am not confident enough to write step by step guidance I cannot stand behind. What I will do is share what I have built, be honest about what went wrong, flag the pitfalls I hit, and point you toward the people and tools that helped me. Think of it as a signpost rather than a map.
Yes on both counts. If you have a project story you want to share, whether you are a hobbyist, a maker, or someone who has built something interesting and wants to write about it, I am happy to consider guest projects. Your name, your story, your work. If you are a maker or a company and you want me to explore how a device or tool fits into a home lab context, I am open to that too. My approach is always honest. I will share my genuine experience first and decide whether to publish based on that, not on whether it flatters the product. I will not promote something just for money.
Weekend Hacks is a hobbyist project. There is no publishing schedule and I do not commit to one. The name says it all really — it is what happens outside of work and family life, when I have a quiet evening and that itch to experiment. Time is precious so I use AI tooling to help me research, explore ideas, and speed things up. Quality over quantity always. When something is worth writing about I will write about it.
I am Andrew, an Engineering Leader. If you want to know more about my professional background or get in touch, LinkedIn is the best place to find me.