Great… can’t wait for politicians to use this as a way to pass “common sense” legislation banning 3D printers.

Used business desktop from eBay is what I run. With what you want to run, you’ll be fine with even 10 year old hardware. I’m running a dozen services on 10 year old basic business hardware with no issues. With regards to media though: if you’re not getting a dedicated GPU, get a Intel 7xxx or later CPU so you have Quick sync for transcoding.

I run Ubuntu Server on one, proxmox on another. Both have their pros and cons. Depends on what you want to do. If your plan is just to run everything in containers (and it should be), Ubuntu with docker is plenty. If you plan on playing around with VMs, go proxmox.

As for what services, here’s a huge list of different self hostable services grouped by category/function: awesome-selfhosted.net Most have a demo site or a quick install guide for docker that makes it easy to try stuff out.

Avoid selfhosted email if you can… it’s a whole different animal.

Been a team lead in title at my company (small software company, out of the start up phase, but was a startup when I joined)) for over a decade. Only figured out how to be a leader in reality over the last 5ish years.

Do you want the title of team lead, or to actually be a leader on your team? Those are often two different things.

Getting the title depends a lot on the politics of your employer. A good place will promote based on merit, others won’t.

Being an actual leader is actually a lot more straightforward: serve the team. Be the driving force behind improving their work lives. That means communicating with them regularly both about what they are finding difficult (and then being a driver in finding a solution) and celebrating them when things go well. It means being a champion for the good ideas others have. It also means asking for help from the team when it’s needed; stay humble.

Through this constant communication a couple of things should start to happen:

• you’ll be able to piece things (solutions, product improvements, bug fixes, etc) more quickly, because your domain and contextual knowledge will be greater than those not serving the team.
• other team members will start coming to you for things, people will naturally gravitate toward those that have proven to be helpful
• the team will start outputting higher quality product
• life for the team will get more enjoyable

Do all that and people will start naturally looking to you.

This is how I got started. HP Elite desk Mini. If you want room for full size HDDs then get the SFF version.

There are already several software solutions for polar alignment; NINA, ASI Air, SharpCap, StellarMate etc. Of those I think only NINA is open source. They all use the primary imaging camera and the mount to calculate the polar error and display that for the user to manually correct. So the alignment part is already solved.

You’d need to figure out a good mounting solution for whatever servo/motor used (and this will likely be very mount dependant) and then just translating NINA’s (or whatever’s) output into actions for the motors.

Pretty much this. Combined with how easy it is to install VaultWarden (docker ftw), it was a no brainer for me.

Been running it for probably about 2 years now. No ISP outages but a couple self-inflicted ones. Didn’t even notice the outages in the BitWarden app/extension.

Try to replicate software/apps you use everyday. Not to improve them, but to figure out how they work. In addition to learning how they work, you’ll learn the problems the original devs had to solve, and one way to solve them.

2nd this. Cheap, upgrade-able, more powerful than the pi, and not limited to ARM. Only thing the Pi has on this is power consumption and GPIO.

Consider a used HP Elite desk SFF (small form factor) with a 6th Gen or later Intel CPU (or the equivalent from Dell or Lenovo). Space for 2x 3.5 HDD for data, an nvme m.2 slot for your OS drive, and a couple of pcie expansion slots.

1.) it’s cheap and replacement parts are plentiful 2.) 6th+ gen Intel CPUs have Quick Sync for hardware accelerated transcoding 3.) fast interface for the OS drive, and room for a pair of multi TB HDDs in raid. 4.) some expandability 5.) power draw isn’t horrible, but nor is it great.

OS wise, lots of options. Ubuntu server LTS is my general go to because it’s easy to Google stuff for and is stable. And I don’t need a desktop environment.

Note about Intel Quick Sync when running headless: you may need a display emulator to get the system to enable it. The HP bios (and maybe some others) don’t have the option to permanently enable quick sync. The display emulator tricks it into thinking a display is plugged in. You can get them on Amazon for under $10.