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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).

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[-] faintwhenfree@lemmus.org 4 points 11 hours ago

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.

this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
158 points (99.4% liked)

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