I Built a Home Dashboard, a Stock Bot, and a Gym RPG (It Made Sense at the Time)

So there's this thing programmers do where they start with a simple idea and somehow end up building a whole second life for themselves. A dashboard. A command center. A place where your house talks back to you. It started with a frustration: I had a homelab — a server quietly humming in the corner running Docker containers, monitoring tools, self-hosted services — and zero visibility into any of it at a glance. I wanted one page. One place. Everything I care about, live, no storing adresses everywhere. So Bambu and I built YanHome. YanHome is a personal dashboard running on my home server. Next.js, Tailwind, Framer Motion — the usual dark-and-sleek setup. But what's on it is where it gets interesting: There's a live status bar showing whether my services are up — Uptime Kuma monitoring, Portainer for Docker, and yes, Bambu himself gets a little indicator too. If something's dying at 3am, I know it asap. There's a Spotify player embedded directly in the dashboard. Controlling what's playing without switching apps sounds lazy. It absolutely is. It's also great. And there's a daily briefing section — AI-generated every morning at 7am. Weather, what's happening today, anything I flagged the night before. Bambu writes it, drops it into a file, dashboard picks it up. No interaction needed. I just wake up and there it is. Then it got slightly out of hand. We added a simple bot logic layer — trading stats widget that pulls live data from my Money project — my autonomous trading bot that runs separately. Win rate, open positions, daily PnL. It all feeds into the dashboard through a local API so I can see at a glance whether the bot is doing something smart or something embarrassing. Usually smart. Sometimes embarrassing. The gym RPG nobody asked for. This is the part I'm most proud of and most embarrassed by simultaneously. I built a leveling system for going to the gym. Like a video game. There are 10 levels. Each one requires a certain number of sessions across a certain number of weeks. You level up, you get a new rank name, the progress bar fills. It resets over a full year. Why did I do this? Because gamification works on me and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Knowing there's a progress bar on my dashboard that doesn't move unless I actually go? That's motivation. Embarrassingly effective motivation. Bambu logs the sessions. The dashboard renders the level, the XP bar, the rank. It looks like a game character sheet. I love it unreasonably. The point of it? I didn't build Yan Home because I needed it. I built it because I wanted a home that felt like mine — one screen that shows me exactly what I care about, does a little work while I sleep, and makes the mundane things (gym, stocks, server health) feel a bit more like a game. It's running right now on my server. Sorry but i need to go to gym now. I'm probably three sessions away from the next rank. Worth it. 🐼