Self hosting is a great opportunity to learn about some popular technologies and even acquire a few sysadmin skills. Required knowledge of a self-hosted solutions tech stack is not gatekeeping any more than required knowledge of tools and building materials is gatekeeping when it comes to renovating your bathroom. In either scenario, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s going to be a much more difficult job.

reverse proxies

That said, you should not be exposing any of your services to the public if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s a quick way to a bad time.

I use Proxmox for Work and Hyper-V at home. Looking forward to retiring my old Hyper-V host and replace it with Proxmox because Hyper-V is a pain.

Virtualization really helps with reliability. In particular, by allowing you to quickly take snapshots before doing anything destructive and by streamlining backup and recovery.

My advice is avoid tape backups. The cost, risk of media degredation, and management overhead make them not worth it, especially for a homelab.

Also, restoring an entire VM is almost easier than recovering a single file, just because of the sequential nature of reading data from a tape. Data recoveries are pretty slow in general.

I backup to an external hard drive with regular copies to iDrive S3. Been doing it that way for a number of years with no problems.

I have a rule that “Nothing will be automated that cannot be manually overridden.”

Well, actually it’s my wife’s rule but it’s a good rule nonetheless. As a result, there’s a big panel full of relays in the basement that is the “last mile” for anything climate control or security related.

There have been a few times when it’s been handy. Like when the exhaust fan isn’t working and I don’t want to debug the ESP32 controller today so I just flip it over to “Manual”.

I use Jellyfin with FinAmp for Android. Even supports offline caching.

Does the new ISP require use of their router or just offer it as an option?

AT&T used to require using their router, which was a pile of hot garbage. I have a Mikrotik Router and managed to mostly cut the AT&T router out but I had to configure my router to use the AT&T router for authentication, at which point the Mikrotik would take over. It was complicated to configure but it worked.

That’s a tough one. There’s not a ton of great options for personal accounting apps, much less self hosted ones. I used Pocket Smith (subscription based) for years which actually does what your looking for. Decent product overall. I switched from them to Quicken mostly because I’m an anal retentive personal accounting nerd and the fact that they couldn’t produce a conventional income statement or balance sheet was a long running frustration of mine.

If I had to choose another platform again, I would go with spreadsheets since it can be as simple or complex as you want to make it. I know that’s not really what youre looking for. Wish I had a better suggestion.

Some of the features you’re looking for led me to switch to Quicken a few years ago. It’s a legacy desktop app (Quicken Online sucks) and it’s not very fast but it is still the gold standard for personal accounting software. I’ve honestly been happier with it than I was with anything else I’ve tried.

Thankfully Intuit sold it off so they can’t enshitify it anymore.

About 12 years ago, I promised an agent at Safeco (AKA Liberty Mutual) that they would never get another penny from me because they wouldn’t honor the terms of my policy, refusing to pay the full amount on a vehicle collision claim. They’re just another business that doesn’t keep their word. But I absolutely plan to keep mine.

I know at some point politics will get me and my style of insulating my engineers will cost me my job, even though by doing so we have great productivity metrics.

Mine ultimately did cost me my job. Or at least it was a contributing factor. I was so sick of the relentless conflict and the toxicity. When I eventually got fired, I missed my team but I was also relieved. It was like a huge weight being lifted. Knowing what I know now, I would never have taken the job to begin with. On the other hand, I do think it helped me grow personally and figure out what my values are. I decided I was ready to put my career on the line if I had to choose between keeping my job and doing the right thing. I did the best I could and my conscience is clear.

We should reframe climate change as an attack on winter recreational activities. Then Republicans might actually give a shit about it.

“Oh, I’m not worried about climate change. But I’m very concerned about the impending demise of snowmobiling.”

Knuckle rapping: for those naughty kids in Catholic school. And also lefties.

Yeah well, 64 years ago Eisenhower warned about the dangers of the military-industrial complex and we’ve all seen how that warning got completely ignored.

17 years in tech. Made it to director level. Decided I hated ladder climbing. Transitioned to software engineering full time and spent the last 5 years doing that. The work life balance was a lot better but the corporate BS was not. I’ve decided corporate jobs may not be for me.

Currently working on a software project of my own. If that works out, great. If not, I may get out of the business instead of going to another corporate job. I’ve got enough experience to do just about anything I want to but I honestly don’t know what that would be.

Employers: “Let’s treat our entire workforce like they’re all completely expendable and let each of them know that we would happily shove them off a cliff if it would have a positive impact on our bottom line.”

Also Employers: “Why are all our employees so disloyal and disconnected? NO oNe WaNtS tO wOrK aNyMoRe.”

Somewhere at a random big box store

Stock Room Employee: “WTF is this? Oh well. Not my problem.” Chucks landmine into trash compactor

“I hope you have nightmares and a fear of fireworks for the rest of your life.” --Jerimy

This shows how short the collective public memory is. There are still people alive today who had polio. I knew an elderly gentlemen who’s face was half paralyzed from having it as a child. Vaccines have increased lifespans and improved the quality of life for humans around the world. Advancements which are now in jeopardy because people lack critical thinking skills and are highly susceptible to bullshit propaganda.

You know its me it’s a me…

FTFY

There are a few things you can do that will help make everyone’s life easier.

First thing, ask engineering what can be done to reduce technical debt and then fight for it aggressively. This is often a hard sell to the product owners at first because it can increase the time it takes to produce new features, at least initially. In the long term, it will pay huge dividends to everyone involved.

When tech debt gets ignored on a new project, the timeline usually goes something like this:

• Project is barreling toward MVP at lightening speed. The Product owner said “move fast, break things” and engineering is delivering based on that mindset and everything seems to be going great.

• MVP is almost ready but uh oh! Now a new feature has been requested.

• “Move fast, break things” doesn’t allow time for code that is easily understandable or extendable to fit new use case scenarios so a huge chunk of the codebase has to be rewritten to accommodate the new feature.

• Wash, rinse, repeat.

Without a major change in design philosophy, the cycle tends to get worse over time with small features requiring more and more extensive refactoring and the number of regression bugs skyrocketing. Not to mention the code base is now a disorganized, smoldering pile of spaghetti that every dev loathes having to work on. Stakeholders are unhappy. Customers are unhappy. Engineers are unhappy. Everyone is unhappy.

Second thing, talk to some actual users, people who are NOT involved in the project, to get their feedback. As an engineer, I like working on projects that add value to someone’s life, or at least make their work day easier. I want the user experience to be positive. I want the features I’m working on to enhance that experience. I don’t want to waste my time working on features that are completely useless and will be rejected by the users as such just because some VP who doesn’t understand what the users want has a bright idea. I’ve experienced this a lot throughout my career and to some degree it’s curbed my interest in software engineering, simply because I feel like a lot of my time and effort were wasted on projects or features that were DOA.