Pi-hole, Caddy, and a Whole Lot of Rabbit Holes

So it all started with a big dream, build a robot using my Raspberry Pi! Went and bought sensors, motor drivers, a breadboard, LEDs, resistors, capacitors... the whole kit. Only to realize, after all that shopping, I had absolutely no clue what I was doing :)

Back to square one then. Started with something way simpler instead, just setting up Pi-hole to block ads across my home network.

And that's when the rabbit hole really opened up. Then came Caddy. Then local DNS, and I went down a whole side-quest figuring out what TLD to even use for local hostnames — .local, .home, .test? Ended up learning about home.arpa instead, a TLD that's actually reserved (RFC 8375) for home networks, so it'll never clash with a real domain, nice. Then HTTPS happened. Before I knew it I was knee-deep in ACME docs, debugging TLS certificate errors, wondering why my home.arpa certs just refused to exist!

Funny how side projects go this way. You start out solving one small problem and somehow end up learning half a dozen technologies you never planned on touching.

Anyway, here's how all the pieces actually talk to each other now:

What I enjoy most isn't even seeing everything finally work, it's that one moment when a confusing error message suddenly clicks. When you understand why it broke, not just how to patch it up.

That's the bit that sticks with you long after the terminal's stopped scrolling.