About

I am an engineer living in Seoul, South Korea. By profession, I work in semiconductor packaging design. By evening and weekend, I run a homelab out of a storage closet in my apartment.

SeoulLayer is where I write about self-hosting, homelab infrastructure, and smart home automation from the perspective of someone doing all of it inside a Korean apartment.

How This Started

During a full interior renovation of my apartment, I discovered that the bathroom wiring did not match the switch box it was connected to. Fixing it properly was too expensive, so I started looking for workarounds. That search led me to IoT devices, then to Home Assistant, then to a mini PC running Proxmox, and eventually to a full server sitting in the storage room next to my front door.

What began as a solution to a wiring problem turned into something I never planned to build.

What I Write About

This blog covers the practical side of running infrastructure at home in Korea. That includes:

• Building and maintaining a homelab in a Korean apartment, where space, noise, power costs, and concrete walls all shape the decisions you make.
• Self-hosting services like Home Assistant, Nextcloud, Immich, and Vaultwarden as alternatives to commercial platforms.
• Networking, monitoring, and security for a homelab that needs to be reachable from outside the apartment without exposing your home IP.
• The real costs, trade-offs, and lessons learned from doing all of this in a country where electricity pricing is progressive, DDR5 is expensive, and most IoT guides are written for houses, not apartments.

If you have ever wondered what it takes to self-host in a Korean apartment, this blog is written for you.

What I Run

The current setup is a Proxmox server with an Intel i7-14700 and 64GB of RAM, running over fifteen services including Home Assistant, Nextcloud, Immich, Vaultwarden, Jellyfin, and a monitoring stack built on Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana. The network runs on UniFi equipment, and external access goes through Cloudflare Tunnel.

The full hardware breakdown and service list are covered in detail across the blog.

Contact

If you have questions, suggestions, or just want to say hello, you can reach me at:

📧 hello@seoullayer.com