I’d first recommend that you think about what you need.
This is the absolutely correct option. I’ve set up way too many things without a use case and lost interest shortly after. If you have a real world use case for your project, even if it’s just for yourself, you’ll have the incentive to keep it going. If you’re just setting things up for the sake of it the hobby loses it’s appeal pretty quickly. Of course you’ll learn a thing or two on the way but without a real world use case the things you set up will either become a burden to keep up with or they’re eventually just deleted.
Personally, tinkering with things that are just removed after a while gave me skills which landed me on my current job, but it’s affected myself enough that I don’t enjoy setting things up just for the sake of it anymore. Of course time plays a part on this, I’ve been doing this long enough that when I started a basic LAMP server was a pretty neat thing to have around, so take this with a grain of oldtimer salt, but my experience is that setting up things that are actually useful on a long term is way more rewarding than spinning up something which gets deleted in a month and it’ll keep the spark going on for much longer.
I think maintainability has a lot to do with it as well, and what you consider maintainable. I see a lot of interesting setups on here but some of the bigger ones I’m iffy about because authentication or some other critical, lower level protocol is outsourced. To some that sounds great and is easily maintained, but I don’t personally consider those super maintainable or sustainable for my setups. I prefer to take the greybeard method and do it all myself. As such, when time comes to do maintenance yeah I have more burden on myself but it’s a burden that I explicitly put on myself and that I enjoy.
This is the absolutely correct option. I’ve set up way too many things without a use case and lost interest shortly after. If you have a real world use case for your project, even if it’s just for yourself, you’ll have the incentive to keep it going. If you’re just setting things up for the sake of it the hobby loses it’s appeal pretty quickly. Of course you’ll learn a thing or two on the way but without a real world use case the things you set up will either become a burden to keep up with or they’re eventually just deleted.
Personally, tinkering with things that are just removed after a while gave me skills which landed me on my current job, but it’s affected myself enough that I don’t enjoy setting things up just for the sake of it anymore. Of course time plays a part on this, I’ve been doing this long enough that when I started a basic LAMP server was a pretty neat thing to have around, so take this with a grain of oldtimer salt, but my experience is that setting up things that are actually useful on a long term is way more rewarding than spinning up something which gets deleted in a month and it’ll keep the spark going on for much longer.
I think maintainability has a lot to do with it as well, and what you consider maintainable. I see a lot of interesting setups on here but some of the bigger ones I’m iffy about because authentication or some other critical, lower level protocol is outsourced. To some that sounds great and is easily maintained, but I don’t personally consider those super maintainable or sustainable for my setups. I prefer to take the greybeard method and do it all myself. As such, when time comes to do maintenance yeah I have more burden on myself but it’s a burden that I explicitly put on myself and that I enjoy.