Does anyone else here participate in the selfhosting hobby without a formal IT related education or a career in a similar field? I’ve only had one or two programming courses as part of my university education, but it was only very basic Python and C. I’ve never formally learned how to use containers, version control or anything else. Sometimes I regret not pursuing an education in IT/programming because there are so many things I’d like to accomplish but can’t (for example if there’s a feature missing in some project, or to feel safe in my abilities to harden my servers and my network in order to expose services to the open internet).
I used to work as an electrician in the automation industry (robots that welded the frame of automobiles) but I was only an apprentice. I worked alongside robot and PLC programmers and absorbed information through them. I lost the motivation to finish my apprenticeship due to a changed perspective on the harmful affects of too much progress. That was as close as I got to any coding.
I decided to enjoy a mid-life retirement after protesting my way into getting fired which gave me time to explore hobbies. Along the way I ended up buying a used Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 and found some joy in both self hosting and shell scripting. Fortunately shell scripting supplements self hosting. I have been slowly crafting a low resource, low maintenance, minimal server.
Both Pi’s run Alpine Linux, the Pi 4 is dedicated to HomeAssistant which controls a handful of lights and switches. The Pi 5 runs Caddy and Kiwix. Right now it just hosts a bunch of wikis and a static file server with Caddy. Eventually I plan to run a blog created only by a single Bash script.
This is all completely outside of any workplace skill and I think I’d like to keep it that way. Programming for money would likely kill the wonder I still have for computers.