New Beginning

June 12, 2021

Originally Posted on Apr 2, 2021

I had always been interested in writing about the things that were of interest to me. Especially, when I started coding with technologies that were unknown to me, everyday was a new beginning and everything was something that I can tweak around with and come up with something entirely new to me. The whole process was so exhilarating that I wanted to document it in it’s entirety and write about things that pick my interest.

Therefore I took the path that was obvious to anybody who would want to write articles on the internet, Medium. To be very honest, I don’t have a problem with Medium. Nor that I had any in the past. But, I always wanted to post my articles in my own domain where I have more control over my infrastructure and my content. Where I TRULY own my content. It was not possible in the past since I wasn’t so technically sound to build an infrastructure for web hosting, and renting one was a far cry.

8 months ago, I bought my first raspberrypi microcontroller to learn networking and self hosting. And I was also fascinated by the infinite possibilities of building things with this credit-card sized computer. Hosting my own website was definitely not a priority to me then. I just wanted to acquire knowledge, so much that, I don’t panic when things go wrong with my setup (which happens all the time). And it definitely took me a lot of making-and-breaking to get things setup properly and finally to be able to host my own website and post my articles in my domain. (Of which this is a first one)

Currently I self host Nextcloud (A self hosted cloud), Jellyfin (A self hosted media center) and Gitea (A self hosted git service) On my raspberrypi microcontroller and access these services outside of my home network. And I’m amazed by how modular and convenient the setup could be when combined with docker to manage the containers running on top of the host. Self hosting has given me a new dimension to think about the tools that I could use to make my digital life more convenient and more user friendly. It has also been an amazing place for me to learn things that I have never thought I would ever come across. I have learned more about things that would not work than things that would. All in all it was a fun journey. And cheers to many more to come. :)