Selfhosted

I don't have any training or schooling in it, at all, I just enjoy computers since I was young 🤷‍♂️

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 got into Linux while earning a degree in social sciences. That led to self-hosting, which later led me to a job in IT.

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.

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.

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.

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 have formal education, from 1997, which serves nothing for the kind of technologies we're using now. Even though I work in IT (call center) I've had to read a lot on networking to make sense of what I wanted to achieve. I also don't know anyone else in my office that does this so I've been relying on online communities and my failures. I've learned so much by failing.

Closest thing I have to a formal education in IT is taking keyboarding, QB, then VB in high school in the early 00s. The only thing I came away with from that was the basic concepts; variables, integers, strings, loops, functions, recursion, etc. I remember nearly nothing about VB. Self taught some Python after that, went to Linux and started learning Bash, CLI tooling, editing confs, working on small portions of languages I didn't know like Haskell (Xmonad) and eLisp (emacs), running containers... Long enough ago I remember manually setting up Apache and MySQL a few times, editing whatever init system I was using to ensure they started, etc.

Time and cost are big determining factors. Sometimes I'd like to know more but never enough to become indebted to educational bills for something I'm not making a career out of. Same reason I can install, remove, rekey and pick various locks, and have installed some access control stuff in the past under an employer, but I'm not shelling out to become licensed Locksmith or Security Systems Technician myself. Tools are comparatively inexpensive, and I have many from past employment, and YouTube is still free and archiveable... add in a bit of "dorking" to find manuals and whatnot and self-teaching just makes more sense for me. Same reasons I'm entering my shade tree mechanic arc these days - it's not worth paying to become an auto tech but it is worth saving thousands on the repairs I can do. Plus it's just fun to learn and work with my hands.

Does anyone else here participate in the selfhosting hobby without a formal IT related education or a career in a similar field?

Yes.

Sometimes I regret not pursuing an education in IT/programming

I've thought the same for most of my life, but right now, not so much. All of my friends in the field are being laid off.

Yes, i would never work on computers for a job. I am too strongly a PEBKAC.

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.

You write "participate" which sounds like a free choise, but I don't do it out of my own free will. I do it because the web is so enshittified, that it forces me to selfhost more and more of my own websites that only I use.

I fucking hate doing any devops. I think it's the most boring, soul sucking task there is. Fucking yamls and .env and config files in different places for every app with it's own syntax.

I tried passing it to an LLM but it's always subtly wrong, so in the end I still have to read everything, correct everything, generate keypairs, configure something on each client etc.

Every day a million bots are hammering my services, so I have to run crowdsec and fail2ban and make sure there are no ways in, everything is behind a login, up to date, constant manual migrations to newer versions cause one of my hunders of apps always has a breaking change.

I've written more devops and security related stuff on my CV than my carreer programming experience. I got a job because now I am not just a fullstack developer, but a fuller stack devsecops-veloper. Showing my homelab and docker setup during a fucking java + react interview landed an immediate yes at the wage that I wished.

I fucking hate devops. Now I have to do it in my free time and at my job. Why does the world force me into devops? Please take it away. Let somebody else handle it. I want to enjoy my life again.

/notsarcasm

Nothing about my IT or software career has changed anything about my set up, except maybe some of the OS hardening info, which could be easily googled.

No need to gate keep, we kill google one laptop at a time :)

I personally do have a degree in computer science, but I feel like I would be doing this anyway, even if I didn't. My degree didn't teach me how to self host

Yeah, I studied linguistics and literature.. Somewhere at the end of university I was presented to Linux and began my journey with computers. Bought a pi in 2012..used it as a media server ... one thing led to another until I was able to build a debian server with 20 containers.

I have no formal training but have been in IT for over thirty years.

I'm a social worker. I have yet to find another in my field who does this, but I'm always searching. When I find them, I'll form a joint practice with them. With our powers combined we will take over the world.

Bachelor of science in molecular biology here. Never had any computer/programming courses, not even in college. I come from a 3rd world country, so our “computer lab” naturally had two desktops that we were only allowed on for half an hour a week for basic windows tasks. I’ve always been a curious person, though. Moved to the US in 2010 and started messing around with a laptop I had that was struggling to run windows. Ran into this thing called “Linux” and the rest is history.

I’ve had countless sleepless nights fixing things on my broken Linux installs and/or to make some things work. That is the thing that built what I know now.

Being the same curious dude I am, I wanted to dip my toes into self-hosting, and I just discovered that it’s just a whole new world that is even more fun. Been doing things in this realm for around 1.5 years now and still dabbling.

Edit: forgot to mention that I now work as a software developer at a big company. Yes, my microbiology degree is sitting in the drawer sleeping. lol

Yes, all self taught. I do some script writing in my job but it's mostly mechanical engineering. I've had lots of people assume I work in IT.

Well, I've had a computer in front of me since the 70s. Don't conflate longevity with knowledge tho. I've had no formal training, even tho I 'ran' the IT dept for a small construction company in another life. One of my jobs was to train old head construction workers on how to use a lap top, a digital camera, how to interface with our servers to upload data from the field. That was wild.

But, no formal training here. Most of what I know I learned by: Reading, screwing it up, doing it again, ad nauseam. And then when something worked, write that shit down.

I learnt basic HTML as a youngling in the 90’s so back before it got very complex, no formal training. I pretended to learn python for my 100 level comp sci in the mid 00’s but completely forgot it after the class was over. I just got into the hobby recently because I did not want to continue paying for stuff but not owning stuff, and it was getting silly expensive for my unlimited free trial hack and personal blog. Plus I wanted to start getting away from big tech, so learning about self hosting from the web and double checking my stuff with Claude really helps.

Yes, I'm a geologist by education and career. I self-host a few different services but keep them all on my LAN. Setting up Netbird is on my to-do list, but I'm simply not confident enough in the network security aspects to expose anything outside of a VPN tunnel.

I have no training. Moved to Linux when W10 came out, and just organically got to self hosting

I was that guy. And then ended up with that career partly because of it.

I had no formal training in hosting when I started. What got me started was, dating myself, blockbuster going out of business and getting over 1000 dvds over the course of their downfall and wanting a better way to watch a movie than going thru a big binder. Found Plex eventually, then built a server from an old workstation and a couple hdds. Then docker and automation, that did get me in the door for my current kubernetes job, now I'm starting to get kubernetes setup at home with 3 mini PCs.

I have no formal training and work in real estate so I’ve taught myself GNU/Linux CLI commands, docker and basic networking stuff with the help of the Internet, YouTube and some LLM assistance. I now self-host around a dozen services via docker on an old Dell XPS laptop for myself. This did lead me to consider a career change and I applied for and got into a free study course for the CompTIA Network+ and Security+ certificates so we’ll see if that ends up just becoming extra help for my hobby or a means to get into IT more broadly.

Ive been self hosting for years, have a 24/7/365 web server public facing, with 20+ services hosted, including a Lemmy instance. No formal education, qualification or any actual experience in any way. Never had a single course or anything. I work as a commercial manager on complex and large infrastructure construction and engineering projects.

I was working in sales when I started self hosting like a decade ago. But the things I taught myself then led me to a career in data analysis. Same company.

No major formal education. Did a DOS class at a local Community College back in the day, only did it for the certificate and made my high school pay for it. I already knew how to do everything they were walking me through anyway, I only showed up a couple days per week to drop stuff off.

The instructor made a big deal one of the last days. He stood near this whiteboard and said, "I'm ashamed, I'm appalled, out of everyone in this class, a high school student has the highest grade."

I didn't have the heart to tell him I learned DOS from the DOS Manual when I was 15. I learned how to do some very basic graphic programming and such when I was in elementary school on an Apple II.

I have worked as a network tech and pc repair tech for a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) helped shoot 2.4Ghz WiFi connections up to 8.5 miles and shot a connection 7.6 miles myself. Most of the network troubleshooting was running multiple ping's to different equipment to watch for issues. Learned on the job how to weatherproof connections using electrical tape and butyl rubber tape. It's also where I learned how to crimp cables from the installer we had.

Most of the job was cleaning up and checking CPE's that came in from previous installs, configuring the CPE's for upcoming installations, and dealing with the phones. The owner was working for another company in IT about 3 hours away. I eventually quit when I was stuck trying to train a new installer and needed help with an issue, the owner quit answering the phone.

I later managed an in house ISP for an apartment building that was converted from a hotel built in the 50's. I brought in 4 different connections, one from a small local WISP using the building as a tower 6Mbps, two AT&T 3Mbps DSL lines, and a cable modem 6Mbps. And provided internet for about 30 apartments using HPNA. Tried getting the owner to change some things but he was off the thought that if it works don't fix it. Most people only got between 750Kbps to 1Mbps due to line quality and the technology.

I do have formal education in the field, but that doesn't mean that I'm easily capable of e.g. writing a module for Nginx or even most website frameworks or knowledgable enough about administration to feel comfortable exposing a dynamic website (as opposed to static HTML+CSS) to the internet.

A lot of it is learning by doing, though, and for a lot of things books are a great resource (some stuff is outdated as soon as it's published, but general system administration or programming knowledge doesn't get outdated that fast).

Starting to mess around with selfhosting, no IT background but grew up on computers.

No IT formal education, training, career or any job here. I'm an accountant by day and this is all a hobby for me, allowing me to save on subscriptions and having complete control of my family's data

Me too. I do not work in IT, I do not even work at a computer.

Started installing first ripped Windows, later Linux on handmedown laptops starting around 2010.

And tweaking the shit out of it, later also to escape the Googleverse.

Selfhosting since 2014.

I can't do everything either but I'm confident enough to let my server face the world. It doesn't take all that much knowledge, mostly common sense.

I guess there's some secondary knowledge, like knowing where to find useful instructions (archwiki) or knowing that Linux software often (but not always) doesn't bother with sane defaults.

If this narrative seems to be coming from the prehistoric past then there's your answer: give it more time. Do what you can do now, and surely your knowledge/capability will grow. Esp. tweaking Linux!

1. Buy books
2. Read

A "formal education" mostly involves reading a book. These books can be identified, purchaed, and read without enrolling in any course.

I have a whole shelf full of text books for IT degrees and certifications. Despite never enrolling in any classes, amazingly, the books still allowed me to read them.

That's me. I don't regret not pursuing a career though because my achievements don't make me feel accomplished. When I get a service running I mostly feel relieved. But, I want the things self hosting provides, so I do the work self hosting demands.