Self Hosting Two Point Oh

A new perspective

I touched on in more recent posts about this 2.0 approach to self hosting. I think on one hand my brain needed to decompress from work and various other factors. On the other, I definitely had a not ideal approach to my self hosting. I fell into the classic trap of starting projects, not finishing them. I had many ideas but no energy to execute on them. All the while I’m burning cash for no apparent good reason. Things had to change.

The step zero, was to do the above, reduce cost. After that I basically did a backlog refinement which I hate using that phrase but it is what I did. I went through my list of projects, deleting, renaming and marking things I already done as complete. My todoist project for my side projects / self hosting went from over 200 items to just 90.

Part of the above lead into my second step of categorising and planning what I would do next. Visualising what my self hosting landscape was going to look like, proved very useful to me. I used the Canvas feature in Obsidian, to map things out. Categories I defined for my self hosting include, but are not limited to:

• Hardware
• Runtime
• Applications
• Services

This is where the brain decompression I mentioned at the start came back in when I finally began to look at Kubernetes again. I avoided self hosting or even using the technology for well over a year, but now I feel like it is the perfect choice for me. It will be my runtime layer that sits on top of my local hardware.

I identified a need for a common runtime since I knew I wanted to write code again. So while I will be self hosting open source Applications on my runtime, I will also be creating Services that extend those Applications. There’s various areas I want to improve my life, mainly through automation. I am looking forward to talking about them more as I write about it. But I think Kubernetes is going to be a real enabler for me.

I’ve never felt more passionate and excited for self hosting. I think I had some negative connotations associated with it, but now I feel my passion has truly returned to it. I can’t wait to sit down and actually finish some projects, not leaving things in a half baked state. Writing code as well is going to be fun and I can’t wait to share more on how the whole stack evolves.