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End of an era

Published on 2023-06-12

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TL;DR: I will stop self-hosting services as my priorities in life has changed which resulted in me not having the time and willpower to maintain them.

Well, this is it: The end of an era, no more working as a system administrator and site-reliability engineer for myself.

I guess a bit of a background is warranted, so lets do that.

Background

Growing up, I was always the odd one out. I was completely enamored with computers and always have dreamed about working with them day to day as a job. If you were there during those time, you’d know that computers was the subject that I always love talking about.

I love learning the history of computers and how things came to be, learning how to use various operating systems, tools, and programming languages, and also getting into the nitty gritty of how stuff works.

One of the things I liked growing up was watching videos on YouTube about hacking game consoles, writing operating systems, etc. These subjects always run around in my head subconciously and once I had the chance to do them, I was estatic.

During the boom of Minecraft, I learned how to setup a Minecraft server and started what was one of the more popular Minecraft servers in Indonesia. From there, I learned how to administer systems, mitigate against attacks (because yes, they did happen), write server code, etc.

Ultimately, what once was a mere hobby for me led to where I am today. Today, I’m working at a German-based software house where I do the things that I dreamed of doing as a kid: administering systems and infrastructure and writing code. Today, I would be lying if I say that I don’t like doing it, I still do.

However, now as an adult, a lot of things in my life has changed and one of them is how I value time and ultimately my priorities in life.

Now, I’m planning to stop self-hosting services. I know there are some people out there who would think that I’m a hypocrite for “not standing up to my values” but the thing is people change, it’s just a part of life and this is how it came to be for me. Whether people think that I’m becoming a better/worse person is irrelevant because ultimately, this is my life and only I decide how I spend it.

I’m not saying that this is objectively the best way to do things because the nature of these decisions are personal and only you can answer them, don’t accept the idea that there’s an objective “best way” whether it’s because of some moral value, technical reasons, or whatever because objectively, there isn’t.

If you can self-host your service, live your life free from big tech companies, good, I’m happy that it works for you. However, and this is something I also learned myself, stop telling other people to be like you and realize everyone has different needs and goals, just because it works for you, doesn’t mean it’ll work for everyone.

Also, I’m not always like this. If you know me for long enough, you know that I used to be the person who preach such things to other people and suggest them to do the things which I perceive as the best way of doing things. And yeah, as mentioned before, I changed and I realized that this is not true and I’m sorry.

Shifting priorities

So what’s up? What made me take this leap in my life?

As you now know, I mostly spent my childhood, teenage, and young adult years with computers because it was the thing that I’m passionate about.

Today, well, I’ve been wanting to branch out to more creative pursuits. I started learning things like mechanical engineering, pixel art, music composition and production, and game development. And well, from there, I made things:

At the end of the day, I find myself more satisfied and happier creating things more than just mere computer programs. Doing this kind of stuff takes a lot of time and dedication hence why for the past couple of months I’ve been thinking about how I want to spend my time. Ultimately, I find myself being annoyed with being a system administrator of one for myself so yeah, this month I decided to simply stop doing it and I’m looking forward to how things go from here.

Changes

With my big server shutting down at the end of this month, a couple of things are changing:

  • All of my personal projects are on GitHub.
    • Originally, I was thinking about moving to sr.ht since I like the simplicity of it but they don’t support Git LFS yet.
    • Then, I was thinking about moving to GitLab SaaS but the costs for Git LFS are too much for me.
    • On Matrix, I moved from @yuki:backalley.club to @yukiisbored:matrix.org.
  • I’ll no longer be available on XMPP.
    • While there’s a lot of open XMPP servers, I decided to simply stop using it since I don’t communicate with a lot of people there and the clients for iOS are not good.
  • Old websites like blog.yukiisbo.red will be shutdown.
    • I don’t know if I’ll move their content to this site but the content will be available in source form on GitHub.

Of course, there are plenty of other things changing but I won’t be mentioning them here since they’re only relevant to me and ever since I stopped using public social medias, I’d like to keep my life more private instead of sharing everything.

Conclusion

If there’s anything you should pick up from this, it should be the fact that you should live your life how you want it to be instead of giving control over it to others. Ultimately, only you know what is best for you.

This doesn’t mean that you should be immune to criticism or suggestions, far from that. Instead, spend time to learn more about yourself, get to know about yourself better, and learn to accept yourself. It won’t be easy but it’s worth it, I promise.

From there, you can start and figure out what you’re comfortable with, what works best for you, and your boundaries. And most importantly: remember, there’s no right/wrong answer.