Sphere Drive is a private file store and personal knowledge wiki for our household. It runs on a home server, answers only on the home network, and sits behind one login. We wanted a NAS-like place for household files that we owned outright, and I wanted a home for the project notes, lessons, and diagrams I write while learning. Neither belonged on a cloud service.

It has two rooms. Shared is a plain read/write file store: drag files in, make folders, open PDFs, pictures, and text in the browser, download the rest. Wiki is the reason the project grew. Docs are filed as Category, Topic, and doc, each with a type and tags. Markdown is edited in place, Mermaid diagrams render inline, and images, PDFs, and HTML lessons sit in the tree like any other note. Every Topic gets a hub page that can be rearranged into a dashboard, and shared tags connect learning notes to the hardware projects that use them.

Pages are rendered on the server, with HTMX swapping the parts that change and Alpine.js for the few interactive bits. There is no build step and no front-end framework. The wiki is just folders of files on disk, so nothing is locked inside the app.

Version 1 wore an LCARS theme and came together in a couple of days. Version 2 rebuilt the structure and the look, a design system called Orbital Glass, after living with the first one: text was hard to read and the navigation labels wrapped. Each feature went from a written spec to a plan to a pull request, built with Claude Code as a pair programmer.