🗺️ Roadmap
The handbook is complete. All six volumes drafted, all 50 chapters live. Version 3.0 (final) — covers every chapter from the original ChatGPT v3.0 spec, plus bonus chapters that fill out the design. The discipline now is to keep it current as the lab grows.
Status legend
- ✅ Published — drafted, reviewed, on the site
- 🚧 In progress — being written now
- 📝 Outlined — outline exists, full content not yet drafted
- ⏳ Future — planned, no work started
The constitution
| Status | Section | Notes |
|---|
| ✅ | PRD · 20 sections | Vision, writing standards, chapter template, volume roadmap, AI agent instructions, QA checklist |
Volume 1 — Foundations
| Status | Chapter | Notes |
|---|
| ✅ | Ch 01 · The Question | TK's original TrueNAS ask and the answer |
| ✅ | Ch 02 · Mental Model | The 7-layer stack: the one picture |
| ✅ | Ch 03 · Drives, VDEVs, Pools | The physical layer; RAIDZ2 explained |
| ✅ | Ch 04 · Datasets | Compression, quotas, encryption |
| ✅ | Ch 05 · SMB Shares | Sharing the data with the family |
| ✅ | Ch 06 · Users & Groups | The Family group, admin vs root, nologin shells |
| ✅ | Ch 07 · Permissions | Owners, groups, modes, ABSE |
| ✅ | Ch 08 · First Apps | Tailscale, Immich, Jellyfin, Vaultwarden, Paperless |
| ✅ | Ch 09 · Snapshots & Scrubs | Time travel and self-healing |
| ✅ | Ch 10 · The Build | The complete configuration in one place |
Volume 2 — Family NAS
| Status | Chapter | Notes |
|---|
| ✅ | Ch 01 · The Family as a System | Designing for the people who'll use it |
| ✅ | Ch 02 · Photos | Immich in production; face recognition, albums, sharing |
| ✅ | Ch 03 · Videos & Jellyfin | Media server, transcoding, hardware acceleration |
| ✅ | Ch 04 · Documents & Paperless | OCR, auto-tagging, the consume folder |
| ✅ | Ch 05 · Mobile Uploads | The three patterns: Immich, landing zone, manual |
| ✅ | Ch 06 · Calendar & Contacts | Nextcloud, CalDAV, CardDAV |
| ✅ | Ch 07 · Extending to Friends | Real accounts vs public links |
Volume 3 — Creator Studio
| Status | Chapter | Notes |
|---|
| ✅ | Ch 01 · The Creator's Storage Pyramid | Scratch, working, archive |
| ✅ | Ch 02 · Project Archives | Structure, naming, README.md |
| ✅ | Ch 03 · Active Project Scratch | Syncthing, proxies, the hybrid workflow |
| ✅ | Ch 04 · Render Workflows | Local vs NAS vs cloud rendering |
| ✅ | Ch 05 · Backing Up the Backups | 3-2-1 for video projects |
| ✅ | Ch 06 · Sharing with Collaborators | Editors, colorists, sound engineers |
| ✅ | Ch 07 · When to Upgrade | Capacity, performance, when to add a second NAS |
Volume 4 — Home Lab
| Status | Chapter | Notes |
|---|
| ✅ | Ch 01 · The Lab as a System | The blast radius principle |
| ✅ | Ch 02 · Networking Fundamentals | IPs, subnets, VLANs, the model of a home network |
| ✅ | Ch 03 · Virtualization | VMs vs containers, when to use which |
| ✅ | Ch 04 · Docker and Containers | docker-compose.yml, bind mounts, networks |
| ✅ | Ch 05 · VMs with KVM | When a container isn't enough |
| ✅ | Ch 06 · Reverse Proxies and TLS | Caddy, Traefik, exposing services the right way |
| ✅ | Ch 07 · Monitoring | Uptime Kuma, Prometheus, alerting |
| ✅ | Ch 08 · Home Automation | Home Assistant, MQTT, Zigbee |
| ✅ | Ch 09 · When to Expand | Second machine, Proxmox cluster, dedicated hardware |
| ✅ | Ch 10 · Cloud Services | Cloudflare Tunnel, Backblaze B2, burst GPU. Hybrid done right. |
Volume 5 — Data Science
| Status | Chapter | Notes |
|---|
| ✅ | Ch 01 · The Data Scientist's NAS | The data layer; raw is sacred |
| ✅ | Ch 02 · Jupyter | JupyterLab on the NAS |
| ✅ | Ch 03 · Data Storage and Format | Parquet, Arrow, partitioning |
| ✅ | Ch 04 · Pipelines and Schedules | Cron, Prefect, the orchestration of recurring work |
| ✅ | Ch 05 · Machine Learning | The ML lifecycle; MLflow for experiment tracking |
| ✅ | Ch 06 · Sharing & Collaboration | Notebooks, datasets, results, with others |
| ✅ | Ch 07 · Reproducibility | Git, DVC, conda, Docker; the discipline of repeatable work |
| ✅ | Ch 08 · Remote Development | code-server, VS Code Remote, SSH workflow, remote Jupyter |
Volume 6 — Operations
By the numbers
| Metric | Value |
|---|
| Volumes | 6 |
| Chapters | 50 |
| PRD sections | 20 |
| Total words | ~95k |
| Pages | 59 (all live at homelab.aidalee.com) |
| Source chat length | 74 messages / ~30k words from the original conversation |
| Version | v3.0 (final) — covers all 36 chapters from the ChatGPT v3.0 spec |
What's next
The handbook is complete. The discipline from here is in the runbook:
- Monthly review of the runbook; update as the system changes
- Quarterly backup test — restore a project, verify the data
- Annual disaster-recovery practice — drive swap, offsite retrieval, restore
When the lab grows (new hardware, new use cases, new lessons learned), new chapters open. Volume 7 is empty for now. The next one starts the day a new question appears.
Roadmap · updated July 2026 · all 6 volumes complete