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 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
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
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.
I don’t have any training or schooling in it, at all, I just enjoy computers since I was young 🤷♂️
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, i would never work on computers for a job. I am too strongly a PEBKAC.
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.
Just got done studying for an AWS cert required for my job. It was 150 bucks and an absolute waste of my time. Do not envy us.
I’ve managed to land on my feet with a new career that’s not related to IT but yes it’s a blood bath right now.
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.
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.