My Computing Journey
To give a little history, the first computer that I remember using was a PC in the shape of a bread box that ran Windows XP. I would spend hours upon hours after I got out of class in high school chatting with friends, and admittingly crushes, on AOL Instant Messenger happily neglecting whatever homework that was due the following day. After using it for a number of years I was able to begin my entrance into the world of Apple with Titanium PowerBook G4. I remember being struck by the visual interface of OS X 10.4 Tiger that was radically different than Windows XP. Since that point I've completely immersed myself into the Apple ecosystem with an iPods, iPhones, and a handful of different desktops and laptops.
I never really payed much attention to folks who were using Linux - I always thought it was meant for hackers or real computer whizzes. Then I decided to start using a Raspberry Pi. This little credit card size board completely flipped my perception of what the power of Linux could really do. I can't tell you the amount of headaches and late nights I spent attempting to set up this little computer as a headless unit so that I could control everything from the command line on my laptop. Over time however, I slowly began to understand how to complete simple tasks such as connecting via SSH, running update commands, mounting external hard drives, setting up a basic file server, etc. My experience with this Raspberry Pi taught me that if I was able to break larger tasks down into smaller ones and really push myself to keep learning, then the anxiety of not being smart enough would melt away and my confidence would continue to grow.
The Raspberry Pi also introduced me into the world of self hosting. As greater parts of our lives are being spent online so is our media consumption. Think of all the streaming services that we have access to. I love having the immediate access to moves and tv shows at an instant but recently I've begun to think about all the physical media that's been sitting in closets at my house. It's true I could find the majority of it through streaming services but there was still something about it that was bothering me. It almost felt wrong to just abandon media that was my own. I began to digitize all my CDs of music and DVDs of movies and tv shows. I scoured the Internet for guides on how to create my own media server that I could access everything from any device on my home network. I even spoke to some friends and convinced them to create their own media servers using Plex so all of us could share our content. Pretty soon we had our own little private streaming service with hundreds of movies and shows at our fingertips. Most of all - it just felt right to be able to interact with something that I had a part in creating and being able to share that knowledge with people in my life.