About

Broke It First is run by one person with a basement full of homelab gear and a habit of finding every way a project can fall over. This site is where those builds get written up properly: what I made, what it cost, and every place it broke on the way.

Why "broke it first"?

Polished tutorials skip the part where things go wrong, which is exactly the part you need when it goes wrong for you. Every article here keeps the mistakes in: the setting that silently did nothing, the screen that came up upside down, the service that said "healthy" while it was down for seven hours. I broke it first, so you don't have to.

How the builds get made

I build and troubleshoot this lab with an AI assistant (Claude). It does a lot of the digging: reading logs, checking configs, tracking down root causes. I make the decisions, own the hardware, and live with the results. When the assistant found the answer, the article says so. I think that's the honest way to write these up, and it's also a genuinely good way to learn this stuff if you're starting out.

The kits

Every article is free to follow. Some builds also have a paid kit: cleaned-up configs, an installer script, a printable guide and a checklist, for people who'd rather skip the fiddly parts. Buying one helps keep the site going. Payment and downloads go through the shop, so I never see your card details.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or a story of your own: [email protected]. I answer when I can, but this is a side project, not a support desk.