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).
Yes. I have no education at all in IT. I have a masters in classical double bass and a career as a musician, working in an opera house now. Computers have always been a hobby and was my second choice for “life path”. Could have easily been the other way around, professional nerd and amateur musician. I am very happy as is, though.
I have three degrees, none of them have focused at all on programming. I had one c++ programming class in uni.
In my experience, most of the IT stuff is easy-ish, if you start trying. Most people have some psychological barrier with anything looking like code. I’ll give you two examples.
My wife would refuse to fix small issues in our home lab, but once I explained, everything we have is backed up twice. And wiped homelab to assure her that we can’t fuck up by accidental edit, we’d have a way to restore it she started trying, and she is decent at it. She even started our paperless container on her own. I had to help a bit in configuring it, but a bit. Soon she maybe able to manage everything. On the other hand.
At work I have this junior, I’m training. First I had a json file, he got scared editing and would bug me everytime. Then I made a simple text file, variable_name space value. He was scared of that too. I finally made a csv that he would open in excel, then he felt comfortable. He refuses to even try 2 years in, because our job in not really technical and I’m not his boss.
TLDR: start trying with simple things, backup everything, you may fail a bit, but it’s not that hard to get started with basics.
Yeah, my education is in electrical engineering and industrial automation. I’ve grown up using computers and like to learn, but I’ve never had any formal education on the subject except for high school programming classes, an intro CS course using Scheme, and a Python 3 bootcamp on Udemy. Everything else that I know is just from hands-on experience and using a search engine.
For hosting services and managing my domain, only a basic understanding is necessary, so I don’t feel held back by it. I do wish that I could contribute to my favourite projects, though.
Yep! I am a mechanical engineer and manual machinist.
My experience with my own self hosting has led to my current added responsibility as IT for our 6 person startup. But 90% of my time is mechanical engineering.
It’s always interesting when someone asks this question because while I do have a formal education in computer science. I’ve had this hobby since before I had that formal education. Linux and self hosting are what made me pursue the formal education part and not the other way around.
Sysadmin here. I’ve been responsible for huuge systems, and been on call.
I’m just lurking. I have a VPS but I happily don’t have any servers at home to maintain
I don’t have any training or schooling in it, at all, I just enjoy computers since I was young 🤷♂️
i have an associates in programming and a bachelor’s in cybersecurity, but i have forgotten most of it. i’m just a dumbass who likes computers now. all i know about this hobby is from the internet
I’m a welder-turned-health and safety manager. What I’m learning from self-hosting I’m using to make our h&s reporting more efficient than it was before.
I picked up programming using “C for Dummies” book at age 13 and absolutely fell in love with developing/tinkering. My school didn’t offer any IT lessons (yes I am old) so I couldn’t wait until I got to a college that offered CS classes. Once I started these classes, I started absolutely hating development, to the point I dropped the course six months in and ferverently avoided anything IT related for the next decade. Eventually I found my way back to it via homelabbing for my own projects through organic need.
The point of my long winded anecdote: a formal education may actually hinder your IT learning more than it helps. The best teacher I found was in fact necessity or passion. Formal education will also teach you next to nothing about skills needed for selfhosting.
I took an HTML elective in high school, and I think a Flash elective as well (might’ve been the same class, it’s a long time ago). And I took one python class in university, but that was all basic python (v1 or v2, can’t remember, I just know it for sure wasn’t v3).
Other than that, I’m self taught on everything I host/do. My professional field is emergency response (I’ve bounced around every specialty except security/policing) so very little IT exposure in my day to day work life.
I’m gonna speak generally and it doesn’t quite generalize. Sue me.
Formal education in computer science is a waste, unless you want to be in academia. A formal education in computer science will either prepare you for higher education in Computer Sciences, or it will drill into you some best practices on how to be a good programmer. You can get the latter through brute force for free.
That said, I have a formal CS education. It has helped my career 0. I’m 10 years into my career and am the 1 man cybersecurity team (plus my boss and my coworker who does most of our networking stuff unless he’s too busy, then that’s me as well) for a fleet of ~4000 devices across ~1500 folks.
I have never once needed to explain to someone what von Neumann architecture is, and how it differs from Harvard. I have never once needed to explain two’s compliment or how to represent negative numbers in binary. Knowing what an xor swap is and why it’s used has only helped me solve a leetcode problem exactly ONE TIME. I have explained to many people what P vs NP is (no your suno track will not be the next cultural phenomenon) but nobody cares.
The stuff that did serve me was like, making the card game of war in Java. Even the GUI. That’s a project I would have never done because who TF would. But it forces you to implement recursion (war within a war), it entails some good validation checking practices, etc. the truth is though, I did not need a college education for that project.
At the end of the day, technical projects teach technical skills. Not PowerPoints based on textbooks.
If you wanna learn how to harden your servers, I recommend freemium hands on learning platforms like tryhackme or hackthebox.
Hack the box has a module on server hardening. It’s my go to for hardening servers. Happy to share the bullet points. It’s not too much. Basically just disable root auth, disable ssh except key-based, enable MFA (I use authelia) and you’re harder than 90% of boxes in the wild. Then just setup Fail2ban and you’re more or less golden for a home server.
I will take your advice to heart.
No. But I wasn’t doing anything particularly complex, just a LAMP stack server for some game forums. Think I had a Dell desktop. Was a dishwasher at the time.
Took a few days fumbling through tutorials but I eventually got it up and running. Repeated that a few times over the years, once to host a blog, stuff like that.
Would like to get into it again but all I have now is a tablet.
IT started as a hobby for me. My initial career was digital art/design. When I was 12/13 my dad let me have a pc, that I had to build from a box of scraps he got from work. I kept adding/upgrading that pc until windows pissed me off. Years later I kept it up on ppc and Intel Macs, when I started college. (No degree at all, went to a fancy art school and they ended up killing my program, so I just got a job instead)
I pretty much got my current job by already running a few various servers at home on arm boards and a NAS, helping with basic o365 admin tasks, and being able to crack open/max out the MacPro6,1s at work. I was only supposed to resize art files lol By the time we named a CTO, he just straight up asked me to run IT for him.
I have my academic bachelors in CS and I’m doing a civil engineering masters on the CS track. So I’m the opposite of your target audience, but I did want to mention something.
Yes there are some fairly technical things like cryptography, natural language processing, and compression algorithms where you will need a good understanding of mathematical subjects like linear algebra, statistics, and group theory.
But apart from subjects like that, you can definitely learn most of what we did at the same pace, or even faster (and even then, something being difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible to learn). You can easily find good resources online to learn languages from Haskell to C. Nobody is stopping you from buying books that are used as course material. Same goes for networking.
Saying all that, I never even learned to work with containers or VMs as part of a uni course. Most of the stuff we learn is in the realm of theoretical computer science. So I probably learned a lot about self hosting the same way you did: the internet and some friends.
