Self Hosting 3.0

Tuesday. January 09, 2024 - 3 mins

The self-hosting dream is pivoting. After 6 months of trying to be all in on self-hosting, it turns out it’s a bit of a hassle. Who knew 🤷‍♀️

Picture the scene. It’s New Year’s Eve. We’re snuggled up on the sofa, wanting to watch a film. I loaded up Jellyfin, only to find out something else had gone wrong with the server setup. It is not Jellyfin’s fault by any stretch, but it was a moment in time spoiled by sloppy sysadmin.

To be frank, I have better things to do.

Working as a software engineer can be frustrating enough when things fall off the happy path. This is something seemingly common when working with MAUI. Voluntarily introducing more of the same into my day is plain silly.

Moving forwards

I will still be self-hosting, just in a less full-bore way. The dual boot Optiplex has been switched back to a dedicated Windows machine. Working with a Microsoft dev stack is much smoother within the MS ecosystem.

I’m still hosting a similar set of services, just in a different way. Through Portainer, I have a set of docker containers to spin up when needed, just like you would any other piece of software.

I’m still keeping consumption patterns offline first. Being deliberate in my choice of media has been refreshing. The result has been a syntopical journey through periods of history, learning about notable figures, tracing the origins of a few legends and myths, and curating a perfect morning podcast playlist.

I’ll still poke at AI and how it can be incorporated into local workflows. Some intriguing options exist between llamafile and LM Studio for making the technology useful in everyday computing tasks.

Lasting changes

I view software a little differently now.

Living without most of the convenience of the cloud made me realise how little I need it. The main benefit is the auto backing up data, which is relatively straightforward to implement without a cloud service. With a bit of forethought, always on music, video, podcasts, audiobooks, etc. isn’t needed. . . personally speaking.

The terminal isn’t a scary place anymore. Whilst I’ve travelled through the lands of the command line for more than a decade, it often made me uneasy to stay there for too long. Now, I’d rather get stuff done there rather than elsewhere. ChatGPT excels as a CLI assistant.

There’s a newfound appreciation for open-source software in the household. Where possible, I’ll choose open-source rather than proprietary and accept the trade-offs that come with it.

My first contribution to open source, a side effect of this journey, is a career benchmark and the moment when the value of it clicked for my partner. We chatted about a foible with the podcast app app we used. I’d fixed it on my phone by the time she awoke the next day, and it landed on hers a couple weeks later.

Conclusion

It was a great adventure. A bunch was learned, some skills accrued, software discovered, and tech slightly more tamed. Happy it happened, but equally happy to move on.

I’d recommend anyone in the tech world, especially those new to it, to dabble with self-hosting. If nothing else, you’ll learn how frustrating and rewarding your new career can be in parallel.

Final Thought

So long servers. Thanks for all the restarts.