For years, I thought the best IT workers were the ones who went home to do more IT for themselves. I was wrong!
I'm a senior system admin in my current role as of this writing. Still working through the imposter syndrome that comes with the word 'senior'. It's true, I've spoken to a few colleagues over the years and was surprised that I'm mostly alone in this self-hosting stuff. Many did when they first got into IT, but that tapered off as they became more comfortable in their career. Those that continued to do so keep it very simple. Mostly maintaining a pi-hole somewhere at home then leave it at that. That was me for years. I totally get it. Very reasonable.
When you spend all day staring at a screen, working through a cavalcade of one crisis after another, it's understandable why we'd want to wrap this stuff up by 5pm. This is key. Go fishing. Play with the kids. Argue with the neighbor through the fence. Whatever familiar coping mechanism that is the opposite of what you just dealt with all day.
That ain't me. I still find a lot of this computer stuff way too fascinating after all these years, even the mundane stuff we all take for granted. The thrill I got in '96 when my 11-year-old self saw 4 computers connected to the same Quake 2 server over LAN at a friends house, in person, left me in tears of joy. My local only N64, with it's split screen multiplayer became a joke. I found my new home. That's me!
Seeing all that tech working for the both of us to make something magical happen like that was overwhelming. I became addicted to solving problems in service of this magic. Not magic in a wizard sense. This was more like telekinesis they call tcp/ip. It's magic adjacent but real. And humans made this? Wild! Stuff like that. When I finally get something to work correctly, I still get a little taste of that feeling to this day.
"You can do your shopping at home or play Mortal Kombat with a friend in Vietnam." -Chip Douglas, The Cable Guy
I'm a kid from the sticks miles from any social life. Summer vacation meant feeling stuck as a mud person in the forest. The wonder of near instant communication between points in space is big part of that wonder, as you can imagine, but not the whole story.
I love self-hosting because I love the control that comes with it. I do it for myself to match my own sensibilities. There aren't any directors or VPs that need to be convinced. No worries about deadlines piling up as my tasks grow logarithmically. No concern about what will happen when I hand it off to others. I don't have thousands of users to worry about. Waking up suddenly at 2am because of a sudden “sense” that I made a mistake somewhere that I can't see because I missed it.
Those anxieties are what occupy my mind most of my waking life, unfortunately. It comes with the IT ops territory. This 24/7 on call work is always hurdling me towards burnout. That's the nature of it. The work related alerts on my phone bring me dread. My own personal network alerts on my phone, on the other hand, even when they tell me that all my stuff is on fire, still bring a kind of joy. Oh, look! Something needs to be tinkered with! A bit of mental balance. This is me!
The stakes are deliriously low at home. I can breathe while working on my own stuff. Small whiffs of magic as I make it a tiny bit better most of the time.
I need my linux/container world at home to balance out my windows/vm world at work. One feeds me but leaves me anxious, while the other treats me nice but hasn't ever paid me. It's not perfect, but it works as well as it needs to.
As you can probably tell by now, self-hosting is a kind of therapeutic hobby for me. It helps manage work burnout by reminding me that at least some of this can still be fun. I've needed that reminder several times over the past 5 years alone. Whether I am finding joy at home or not with my own stuff has shown to be a good barometer for my own mental health.
No matter how well I think I designed my home systems, It's all about using my imagination and playing in the sandbox at the end of the day. Stakes are very low. My wife is my only user, and she just wants the internet to work with as little advertisements as possible and the homepage I made to show her stocks. I'm in alignment with this directive. Deal!