I’m Suvir. I’m seventeen years old, I go to South Brunswick High School, and I can’t decide on an operating system.
Even though most of this page is about my server, it doesn’t capture my whole range of abilities. The reason I decided to start with a hook like that is because it’s by far my proudest project yet.
The rest of this website is code. A study app for my AP Statistics class that people really used, a macOS app that allows people to show off what they’re listening to on Discord, an easy downloader for music just because the ones that existed annoyed me, and finally a project for my friends to use the SAT question bank just because downloading PDFs for each topic was inconvenient. The newest one is a survey of which New Jersey school districts have told the world’s mail servers to reject email pretending to be them, and how many haven’t.
I’m graduating in June of 2027. I’m always looking for more work. I’m open to internships and part-time positions. I just want people who will let me near real infrastructure.
Here’s the server, rebuild by rebuild. Five rebuilds, three operating systems, one gaming PC.
Proxmox, on an old HP laptop from 2015. I picked Proxmox because it was the first recommendation that popped up when you searched for home lab on Reddit and other forums. This was a computer that my family never used, so it seemed perfect. Knowing absolutely nothing about networking, getting the WebUI and the VMs set up was a journey by itself.
The laptop is now sitting in a drawer. It still works, though.
Proxmox, on my gaming PC. I stopped playing video games, so I never had a use for it after. I had a Mac now, and that was enough. The PC had a powerful CPU and plenty of RAM, which I upgraded later on. The networking didn’t get easier, but at least I was getting the hang of it. The continuity with the VMs wasn’t great, and I didn’t feel like debugging machines at 3 a.m. because I wanted to watch a movie or people couldn’t access my Minecraft servers.
I learned about reverse proxies and how easy it is to have your server compromised when exposing services to the web.
Unraid. Unraid was easy. The drives just worked. I was able to run parity, so data loss was rarely a worry. I could do everything I needed with just mouse clicks instead of running Linux commands and praying they worked. This was the best during the school year because it required such low maintenance that I could start the server and forget about it.
Lasted the longest of the five rebuilds because of its ease.
Proxmox, again. The ease of Unraid started to feel underwhelming. This was when I realized I actually enjoyed the debugging sessions. Even though they increased my stress level overall, it was fun to learn how a capital letter could take down my whole media stack.
The problem wasn’t the OS. I just couldn’t make up my mind.
Ubuntu. I wanted a GUI to explore KDE and Hyprland. Up to this point, I had never used a Linux distro with a GUI. All my work had been in the CLI or the WebUI. The great thing about Ubuntu was that I could use that machine as my main computer via Moonlight and still run every service that I had running on Proxmox.
This might change by next summer.
I didn’t come out of these experiences mastering Linux, exactly. I came out knowing that getting a service running was only a third of the work. After that, it has to be reachable, logged into, backed up, watched, and easy enough that I can fix it at 11 at night or restore from a backup when it stops working. Starting from scratch five times wasn’t the best way to learn that, looking back.
What I got wrong. Three things I’d rather say myself than have you find out.
I spent hundreds of dollars on AI tools looking for the best one. Different platforms, overlapping subscriptions, months of it. Whichever one is best changes every few weeks, so I was tuning my tools instead of finishing my work. I still use them every day. I just stopped expecting them to know what I meant.
I couldn’t commit to an operating system. Five rebuilds means the server spent more time getting set up than it did being used. At least twice I switched because I was bored, not because Proxmox or Unraid was stopping me from doing anything. I like the setup part more than I should, and that is a slow way to get something running.
Sometimes I quit for a week. When something is broken deep enough (permissions, DNS, a container that won’t resolve its own hostname) I stop and come back seven days later. It works more often than sitting there does. I have never once found the answer on the night I was mad about it.
A list of only wins isn’t believable.
Right now.
- Last push
- github.com/Suvir0
- The server runs
- Ubuntu, with a desktop on it for once. Docker for anything that will tolerate it.
- I mostly write
- Python and TypeScript. Java for AP CS, and enough C++ to keep the Discord bridge compiling.
- Also keeping alive
- Cloudflare DNS and tunnels, an Authentik login for the private stuff, and Grafana dashboards I check more often than I need to.
- Working on
- The SAT practice app. Cleaning up the extractor so the repo can go public.
- Open to
- Internships, and anyone who wants a second pair of hands on their infrastructure.