Welcome to Abrar Builds. This site is hosted on my own hardware. 📺 Follow the Build on YouTube If you like self-hosting, homelabs, and building cool stuff from scratch, I document everything on my YouTube channel — the wins, the mistakes, and the “why is this broken at 2am” moments. 👉 Subscribe here: https://www.youtube.com/@Abrxrbuilds More deep dives, experiments, and behind-the-scenes builds coming soon.
Intro Five courses. Five platforms. Assignment deadlines scattered across eCentennial, Pearson MyLab, GitHub Classroom, and Connect. Late penalties ranging from “one day, 50% off” to “seven days, 25% off” to “no resets after close.” Quiz windows that open and close on different days of the week with no consistency. I was checking five platforms every morning to figure out what was due that day. Half the time I’d miss something because it was buried in a sidebar on Pearson or posted late on eCentennial with no notification. ...
Intro This website — abrarbuilds.com — runs on a repurposed mini PC sitting in my house. No AWS. No Vercel. No Netlify. No monthly bill. If you have a spare machine and a domain name, you can do the same thing. This post is the exact setup I use: Hugo for building the site, Caddy for serving it, Docker for keeping it clean, and a cheap PC for running it all. ...
Intro If you use Claude regularly, you’ve probably felt it. Responses that used to be sharp are now a bit… off. It forgets context mid-conversation. It repeats itself. It hits your usage limit faster than it should. And it feels slower. You’re not imagining it. In April 2026, Anthropic published a postmortem admitting that three separate changes they made to Claude Code had the combined effect of making the model feel dumber, slower, and more forgetful. They said it wasn’t intentional. But the pattern raises a question that every AI user should be asking: when does optimization become throttling, and who’s actually paying the price? ...
Intro Welcome back to the homelab series. If you missed the first post, Homelab v1 was intentionally minimal — a NAS, a VPN node, and a single switch. It worked great for what it was, but as devices multiplied, so did the need for better network organization. Homelab v2 is still simple, but it introduces a backbone topology with multiple switches. Nothing fancy, no managed hardware yet, but the physical layout now makes more sense for how the space is actually used. ...
Intro This post is a straight build log. No diagrams, no marketing language, no VPN theory deep dive. Just what I actually did, in order, to set up NetBird on a Raspberry Pi so I could securely access my entire homelab from anywhere without opening a single port on my router. No port forwarding. No exposed reverse proxies. No public services. Just encrypted mesh networking using WireGuard under the hood. ...
Intro This is the build log of how I turned a Lenovo ThinkCentre M93p into a proper NAS running TrueNAS — and then completely removed it from its original tiny office chassis and rebuilt it inside an mATX case with RGB fans. Yes, I turned a corporate office PC into a glowing NAS. This system runs four 1TB SATA hard drives and gives me 3TB of usable storage, split intentionally across striped and mirrored pools depending on what the data is for. ...
Intro Welcome to the first post in what I hope becomes a long-running series documenting my homelab journey. If you’re here, you’re probably curious about self-hosting, home networking, or just like reading about other people’s tech projects. I get it. I spend too much time doing the same thing. This series will follow my homelab as it evolves, starting from the absolute basics and growing into something more complex over time. Each version gets its own post, documenting what changed, what I learned, and what broke along the way. ...