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).
My self hosting hobby is why I got into my career in IT.
I learned everything I know in IT from tinkering/research. Higher education was absolutely worthless for my IT career, but at least it was free and I didn’t get myself into debt. Of course I got into computers in 1994 when people started buying home computers.
I’ve been in film/television/video production my entire career. It’s a creative field that also relies heavily on ever-changing technology, so I’m not too outside of a tech field. But I’ve always been a geek. Eventually the enshittification comes for us all, and I said, fuck this, I’ll just figure out my own music server. Then, I’m gonna support the right to repair (Framework). I’ll use Linux, I’ll focus on privacy. And then it snowballed…and now I’m just the meat bag that keeps the 42U rack in my basement working :)
Yes
I professionally work in IT without formal education or any related career. It’s one field where you can really teach everything yourself with free online resources.
In fact my self hosting journey has taught me things that were later useful for work. I consider it part of my informal education.
I have no education i learned all through trial an error an google
i might be a more typical nerd. i have a phd in physics and took a bunch of computer science course out of interest/boredom.
but i never learned anything that is really related to hosting. containers were not really a thing at the time and most courses i took were much more fundamental, like basics of networking or cpu scheduling. programming a learned on the fly to solve a problem, never as actual task in itself (what is very typical in my field and leads to horrible program code/collaboration scheme)
Yes, I’m not an IT professional and don’t have education in anything related to computers. Has always been a hobby for me. I don’t want to do my hobbies for work because I fear it would take the fun out.
I don’t do any self-hosting anymore, but when I started I only had a couple uni classes that were related (I quit after about 9 months as uni wasn’t for me when I was 17). I somehow got recommended Gentoo linux back in the early 2000s and stood up my first server not long after (and got a lot of lessons in dealing with email servers). Now, I just don’t have the time to do it as a hobby and certainly not the money for any hardware in this economy. I thankfully never had any real security/hacking issues thanks in part to good guides even back then. It actually taught me a lot about both linux and many other things. I’m now a software engineer for a living, but mostly just doing backend work with little exposure to the infra side.
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.
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.
That’s funny since I didn’t even know what Linux was when I started my CS education, nor that there were so many services you could host yourself. I was egged on to try Linux and (eventually) get a small homelab by my uni friends, who were probably more like you
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.
I don’t have any training or schooling in it, at all, I just enjoy computers since I was young 🤷♂️
I have no formal training but have been in IT for over thirty years.
The IT way
