Why I Built My Own Remote Server

Too many engineers today cannot function without AI autocomplete and slick IDEs holding their hand. That is not progress. That is dependency.

Recently I decided I should have my own remote server. The goal was simple. I no longer wanted to be tied to any one machine. I wanted to be able to sit down at any computer anywhere, log in securely, and immediately get to work. No setup time. No wondering if my files were synced. No excuses.

Let me introduce you to WARBOX. Short for Warshowsky Box which is my last name but also a reminder this is my workspace. My control center. My foothold in the cloud. WARBOX lives on Oracle’s forever free tier. Yes Oracle. Not AWS. There is more to the cloud than AWS. It runs Ubuntu on a modest virtual machine with a single core and up to 24 gigs of RAM. That is enough with 200Gb of storage. I can SSH in from anywhere and my tools my projects my environment are exactly how I left them.

WARBOX is now my main development environment. It holds my notes, my scripts, my experiments, my dotfiles, my Git repos and more. It is tuned exactly to how I want to work. But this is not about WARBOX itself. This is about what WARBOX represents. If you want to call yourself an engineer you should know how to work on a remote machine. More than that you should build one.

Here is why.

First independence. If your ability to work depends on a specific laptop or a specific IDE or on AI guessing what you meant to type you are limiting yourself. A remote box gives you freedom. You can work from any machine that can run a terminal. Your environment is always there. Your tools are always ready. Your excuses disappear. WARBOX has become so central to how I work that even my to do list and schedule live on it now. Soon my email will too. I do not think about context switching anymore. I think about getting to work.

Second practice. Running a machine sharpens skills that most engineers today have allowed to rot. You learn how to harden a machine. You learn how to monitor it. You learn how to provision resources properly. You build muscle memory for the fundamentals. SSH, Bash, Vim, Git, systemd, etc. These are not old school. They are the invisible infrastructure behind almost everything. Owning your own box keeps those muscles strong. WARBOX pushed me to finally switch to Vim full time. I have become far more precise. I think more carefully because there is no autocomplete saving me. I use Vim commands so much now I find myself wishing I had them in every editor. That precision has made my work better everywhere.

Third discipline. WARBOX is small on purpose. There are no endless resources. I cannot brute force my way through problems with more RAM or more cores. I have to be careful. I have to understand what I am doing. There is no GUI to hide behind. No DevOps team to bail me out. My storage is limited and I do not want to pay for more. That forces me to understand exactly what I install. It pushes me to find better cheaper cleaner solutions. I work lean because I have no choice. WARBOX also cuts out distractions. No notifications. No tempting rabbit holes. My time spent on pointless things like YouTube has dropped. This box exists for one purpose. My work.

There is a generation of developers now who think they are engineers because autocomplete finishes their thoughts and AI spits out code faster than they can read it. Maybe that works in the short term. Maybe it even makes them feel productive. But when things break or when the tools vanish or when the answers run out they will not know what to do. That is the difference.

In a world drowning in abstraction the best engineers still understand the basics. Having your own remote box keeps you close to the work. It keeps you sharp. It forces you to stay honest. I have had to research and figure out things I would never have touched if I stayed inside an IDE bubble. That alone has made me a better engineer.

The other week I needed to access a project. I borrowed someone’s computer. I opened a terminal. I logged into WARBOX. My scripts were there. My setup was ready. No wasted time. No reinstalling tools. No figuring out what was broken. I did my work and moved on. That is freedom.

WARBOX will never write my code for me. It will never distract me with notifications. It will never waste my time. It makes me better because it forces me to be better. That is why it exists. That is why yours should too.

The machine is small. The lessons are big.