As a sysadmin, I spent years managing my Proxmox homelab the hard way - juggling browser tabs, editing config files by hand, running the same commands over and over. Every gap in my workflow was a small daily frustration. Then I stopped waiting for someone else to fix it and built ProxUI: a self-hosted Proxmox management UI built by a sysadmin, for sysadmins.
This talk is not about being a developer. It's about recognizing that the tool you need probably won't be built by a company - because your use case is too specific, too personal, and too real. Every feature in ProxUI exists because I needed it: a single-page cluster dashboard, multi-cluster switching, automated cloud-ready qcow2 image builds, LXC device passthrough without editing config files, and more. Each one started as something I was doing by hand.
I'll walk through the gap-driven development process: how frustration becomes a feature, how a sysadmin with minimal software engineering background ships a real tool and giving to the open source community. I'll also cover the infra around the project — how to build and store cloud images, how to run a live demo environment, and how to deploy ProxUI in your own homelab in minutes.
If you've ever thought "someone should build this" — this talk is for you.
Alex is an Austin-based DevOps and Site Reliability Engineer with over 15 years of experience keeping Linux systems highly available, currently supporting enterprise infrastructure at EPAM Systems. He's a lifelong Linux lover and devoted self-hoster who runs a sprawling homelab built. Alex is the creator of ProxUI, an open-source Proxmox management UI, and spends his free time building tools that make infrastructure easier to run. When he's not in the terminal, he's enjoying Hill Country life with his beautiful wife, son, and three black cats.