I’ve been a Software Engineering Student for 2 years now. I understand networks and whatnot at a theoretical level to some degree.

I’ve developed applications and hosted them through docker on Google Cloud for school projects.

I’ve tinkered with my router, port forwarded video game servers and hosted Discord bots for a few years (familiar with Websockets and IP/NAT/WAN and whatnot)

Yet I’ve been trying to improve my setup now that my old laptop has become my homelab and everything I try to do is so daunting.

Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit, and so many more things get thrown around so much in this sub and other resources, yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things. Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know. And the few that actually explain how to set it up are just throwing so many more concepts at me that I can’t keep up.

Why is self-hosting so daunting? I feel like even though I understand how many of these things work I can’t get anything actually running!

  • Ieris19@alien.topOPB
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    1 year ago

    I wanna preface this making something clear, I have probably never managed to follow a tutorial. I usually have an idea and try to run it. What I’m getting stuck at is precisely at the “what are my options”

    I did say that I understand why docs expect you to be familiar with knowledge, I’m even complaining that I don’t need to read what something is a million times and sometimes I just need to get a solution to my problem.

    My biggest issue here is lack of experience, but after two years in an IT education, I know some basics. I am familiar with countless topics and have a general idea of how things work in theory, but getting these ideas into a setup is what’s hard. Uni doesn’t help at all with this.

    I think my problem is quite honestly the opposite of what you present, I need to know deeper knowledge than what’s enough and have trouble actually conceptualizing things that are presented as magic. For example, Docker presents itself as magic in most of the docs. Volumes, layers, and so much more are explained with how to make one and what to use them for rather than what they are. It might just be the way I memorize things is weird, or that I’m stuck with too little knowledge and way too deep.

    I do mostly agree with your comment though, I just feel like I’m shit at explaining myself cause I’m clearly not getting my point across