Closest thing I have to a formal education in IT is taking keyboarding, QB, then VB in high school in the early 00s. The only thing I came away with from that was the basic concepts; variables, integers, strings, loops, functions, recursion, etc. I remember nearly nothing about VB. Self taught some Python after that, went to Linux and started learning Bash, CLI tooling, editing confs, working on small portions of languages I didn’t know like Haskell (Xmonad) and eLisp (emacs), running containers… Long enough ago I remember manually setting up Apache and MySQL a few times, editing whatever init system I was using to ensure they started, etc.

Time and cost are big determining factors. Sometimes I’d like to know more but never enough to become indebted to educational bills for something I’m not making a career out of. Same reason I can install, remove, rekey and pick various locks, and have installed some access control stuff in the past under an employer, but I’m not shelling out to become licensed Locksmith or Security Systems Technician myself. Tools are comparatively inexpensive, and I have many from past employment, and YouTube is still free and archiveable… add in a bit of “dorking” to find manuals and whatnot and self-teaching just makes more sense for me. Same reasons I’m entering my shade tree mechanic arc these days - it’s not worth paying to become an auto tech but it is worth saving thousands on the repairs I can do. Plus it’s just fun to learn and work with my hands.

I’m a welder-turned-health and safety manager. What I’m learning from self-hosting I’m using to make our h&s reporting more efficient than it was before.

Yes, i would never work on computers for a job. I am too strongly a PEBKAC.

Does anyone else here participate in the selfhosting hobby without a formal IT related education or a career in a similar field?

Yes.

Sometimes I regret not pursuing an education in IT/programming

I’ve thought the same for most of my life, but right now, not so much. All of my friends in the field are being laid off.

I’m gonna speak generally and it doesn’t quite generalize. Sue me.

Formal education in computer science is a waste, unless you want to be in academia. A formal education in computer science will either prepare you for higher education in Computer Sciences, or it will drill into you some best practices on how to be a good programmer. You can get the latter through brute force for free.

That said, I have a formal CS education. It has helped my career 0. I’m 10 years into my career and am the 1 man cybersecurity team (plus my boss and my coworker who does most of our networking stuff unless he’s too busy, then that’s me as well) for a fleet of ~4000 devices across ~1500 folks.

I have never once needed to explain to someone what von Neumann architecture is, and how it differs from Harvard. I have never once needed to explain two’s compliment or how to represent negative numbers in bunary. Knowing what an xor swap is and why it’s used has only helped me solve a leetcode problem exactly ONE TIME. I have explained to many people what P vs NP is (no your suno track will not be the next cultural phenomenon) but nobody cares.

The stuff that did serve me was like, making the card game of war in Java. Even the GUI. That’s a project I would have never done because who TF would. But it forces you to implement recursion (war within a war), it entails some good validation checking practices, etc. the truth is though, I did not need a college education for that project.

At the end of the day, technical projects teach technical skills. Not PowerPoints based on textbooks.

If you wanna learn how to harden your servers, I recommend freemium hands on learning platforms like tryhackme of hackthebox.

Hack the box has a module on server hardening. It’s my go to for hardening servers.

No formal education in IT, I’m a GI surgeon.

I built my own gaming pc’s in mid-late 00s and i also knew some basic html just by the virtue of being on the internet as a kid and trolling at bulletin boards/trying to build some websites.

In 2018 i was miserable as a GP after finishing my medical decree. I was thinking about changing careers and I did most of the online version of Harwards CS50 course for fun. In the end i did become a surgeon and not an engineer.

In 2025 Trump II happened and seeing that the tech billionaires were in on it, I lost faith in the USA as a country. I wanted to get off all of my subscriptions and american big tech services, which I’m happy to say ive almost completely achieved. As i was searching for the best replacements for all the services I realized the cleanest and most future-proof path is to host my own.

I run nextcloud, immich, jellyfin, matrix, home assistant, paperless, ollama etc etc. There’s still a whatsapp account unfortunately. It is mirrored to my matrix instance so the (grapheneOS) phone i use daily doesnt have a whatsapp client but a matrix client instead. Nothing is happening on the phone whatsapp runs on.

You write “participate” which sounds like a free choise, but I don’t do it out of my own free will. I do it because the web is so enshittified, that it forces me to selfhost more and more of my own websites that only I use.

I fucking hate doing any devops. I think it’s the most boring, soul sucking task there is. Fucking yamls and .env and config files in different places for every app with it’s own syntax.

I tried passing it to an LLM but it’s always subtly wrong, so in the end I still have to read everything, correct everything, generate keypairs, configure something on each client etc.

Every day a million bots are hammering my services, so I have to run crowdsec and fail2ban and make sure there are no ways in, everything is behind a login, up to date, constant manual migrations to newer versions cause one of my hunders of apps always has a breaking change.

I’ve written more devops and security related stuff on my CV than my carreer programming experience. I got a job because now I am not just a fullstack developer, but a fuller stack devsecops-veloper. Showing my homelab and docker setup during a fucking java + react interview landed an immediate yes at the wage that I wished.

I fucking hate devops. Now I have to do it in my free time and at my job. Why does the world force me into devops? Please take it away. Let somebody else handle it. I want to enjoy my life again.

/notsarcasm

Bachelor of science in molecular biology here. Never had any computer/programming courses, not even in college. I come from a 3rd world country, so our “computer lab” naturally had two desktops that we were only allowed on for half an hour a week for basic windows tasks. I’ve always been a curious person, though. Moved to the US in 2010 and started messing around with a laptop I had that was struggling to run windows. Ran into this thing called “Linux” and the rest is history.

I’ve had countless sleepless nights fixing things on my broken Linux installs and/or to make some things work. That is the thing that built what I know now.

Being the same curious dude I am, I wanted to dip my toes into self-hosting, and I just discovered that it’s just a whole new world that is even more fun. Been doing things in this realm for around 1.5 years now and still dabbling.

Edit: forgot to mention that I now work as a software developer at a big company. Yes, my microbiology degree is sitting in the drawer sleeping. lol

I learnt basic HTML as a youngling in the 90’s so back before it got very complex, no formal training. I pretended to learn python for my 100 level comp sci in the mid 00’s but completely forgot it after the class was over. I just got into the hobby recently because I did not want to continue paying for stuff but not owning stuff, and it was getting silly expensive for my unlimited free trial hack and personal blog. Plus I wanted to start getting away from big tech, so learning about self hosting from the web and double checking my stuff with Claude really helps.

Yes, all self taught. I do some script writing in my job but it’s mostly mechanical engineering. I’ve had lots of people assume I work in IT.

I have no training. Moved to Linux when W10 came out, and just organically got to self hosting

I’m a social worker. I have yet to find another in my field who does this, but I’m always searching. When I find them, I’ll form a joint practice with them. With our powers combined we will take over the world.

I had no formal training in hosting when I started. What got me started was, dating myself, blockbuster going out of business and getting over 1000 dvds over the course of their downfall and wanting a better way to watch a movie than going thru a big binder. Found Plex eventually, then built a server from an old workstation and a couple hdds. Then docker and automation, that did get me in the door for my current kubernetes job, now I’m starting to get kubernetes setup at home with 3 mini PCs.

I was enrolled in community college for computer science around '08-'09. I completed Visual Basic and C++ intro courses in before switching to mechanical engineering, which is now my field of employment. I built a Windows Media Center HTPC with a tuner card during my community college years. That HTPC evolved over time, and eventually Microsoft killed WMC. I tried Plex TV recording, but that sucked balls compared to WMC. The latest incarnation of that computer runs TrueNAS, and I’m not really doing much with it beyond self-hosting media, but I have a Mint VM installed and set up for a Valheim dedicated server in anticipation of the 1.0 release next month. I might eventually move Home Assistant off a Pi into my TrueNAS, but it hasn’t been high-priority.

Yes, I’m a geologist by education and career. I self-host a few different services but keep them all on my LAN. Setting up Netbird is on my to-do list, but I’m simply not confident enough in the network security aspects to expose anything outside of a VPN tunnel.