My homelab journey
Science & Technology has been fascinating for me from the very beginning even when I didn't had access to any experimental electronic equipment or any opportunity to paly with that in school or college also. I use to be vivid reader of all the science magazines Junior Science Refresher, Computer Science Refresher etc. in my childhood but at most I was able to play around with some mechanical stuff or some physics but no electronics.
If I remember it correctly my homelab journey started with buying a single bay D-Link DGS600 on a sale that allowed some capabilities of tinkering with the hardware and software. The next was Netgear ReadyNAS with 4 bays (I still have this one) which supported media streaming and installing additional apps.