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 work in the medical field. All my it IT skills are self taught, starting way back with coding in BASIC in C64 and taking apart RC cars.
With enough interest and persistence, you can learn what you need to. IT skills are pretty democratic.
Self hosting stuff is a great gateway drug because it introduces…complications. The path between A and B always seems to take detours, which is where the learning happens.
It’s interesting reading people talking about problem X, with everyone confidently advocating solution Y. I often find myself thinking “well, that’s not been my experience. I would just do A”.
It’s good to see how other people solve similar problems. Eventually you’ll arrive at that old homily “the way you do one thing is the way you do everything”, which is useful too.
Ultimately, just… start anywhere. Soon enough something will piss you off enough that you roll up your sleeves and work the problem - don’t look, but you’ll be learning those IT skills IRL without having to crack a textbook.
I’m from a social work background. Psych major.
Computer stuff was always a hobby.
Never in an IT profession, but I did show a colleague how to cut and paste using keyboard shortcuts and he asked if used to work in IT.
I have no formal training but have been in IT for over thirty years.
Was going to say this, I’m a professional too beginning without formal training (whatever exactly thst covers). Did some certificates and stuff later on which may or may not still be relevant (due to specific fields).
The IT way
I’m a 26 year veteran systems / infrastructure engineer and often work on large scale data / server migration projects. My homelab is larger and more robust than 95% of the client sites I service; everything is enterprise class hardware and software. I self host my own RMM, VPN, and various data and entertainment services. Most of the things I run here are to make my life better or easier for myself and my family.
My formal education is in business administration; I did not go to school specifically for an IT Degree. It’s just something I love. I went to school to understand the business side of the thing I love, which has been very helpful. If you find a job doing what you love, work can feel like an accomplishment instead of a burden.
Never stop learning!
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 :)
I imagine most people that do this are already IT professionals. Or if they can do this they should be IT professionals. The difference between what I get paid to do and self-hosting is generally the scope and cost of the hardware. That’s about it.
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.
Have a server and 2.5gbe network setup, have my own custom router, 2 small game servers and one big media server(240tb). Never had any sort of IT or networking job. This is just fun to do things never worked in the field
I have no education i learned all through trial an error an google
Yes
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.
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.
Great post. For those who don’t know, breaking shit is a good way to learn.
Basically same here except Millennial timelines. I only really know what I use myself.
I only really know what I use myself.
That’s basically how I know just about anything. Hands on failure until it works. And when you think about it, success is merely a string of failures. Given that, I’m succeeding like a mofo. lol
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
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.
I will take your advice to heart.
