Published May 15, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.  Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals. NAS and self-hosting are one and the same now, but they weren't always as synonymous with one another. At some point in the last few years, subscription costs began to pile up , streaming libraries fragment further every quarter, and the idea of paying indefinitely for software you could run yourself has started to feel less like convenience and more like you're getting the short end of the stick.…