I installed CoreOS in 9 years old MacBook.

DeLorean DMC-12

Because I didn’t know too much about servers I used to use a cheap hosting with PHP and MySQL. But some time ago, when I started to build Ruby on Rails and Node.js apps I was searching for a better option and I discovered the world of PaaS. That changed the way I deploy now.

At the beginning, there was a lot to understand because I used to use, like many other web developers, just an FTP to update my site, but after a couple of days working with git I understood how to deploy with a push and that was like music to my ears.

Then I tested a lot with Vagrant: it was so easy to create and destroy machines that I installed every version of Ubuntu, Apache, Nginx, MySQL, Node, MongoDB I could… I learnt a bunch of things making a lot of mistakes.

But when Docker and DigitalOcean arrived you think that it couldn’t be anything better beyond that. But it could… your own server! Bad idea.

After some time learning and configuring servers, I thought: “Hey! I got enough knowledge to set up my own machine”. Actually that kind of “server” you know, for fun, at home. And because I like to remember what Doc Brown said:

“The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?”

It couldn’t be as fun as travel in time, but I wanted to build a server with an old MacBook and mix it with a new shiny Linux. My own time machine.