Computers Are Hard

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a penchant for doing things myself where possible, rather than relying on other people to do that work for me. This is a somewhat unproductive trait to have in today’s society, where specialization and internetworking are king, but it’s certainly an excellent avenue for education.

I blame my dad for this; we grew up on a rural homestead in Minnesota, and did our own maintenance on the buildings. Dad is a cabinetmaker, among his other skills, and so we had a fair amount of time in the woodshop making furniture, and in the barn turning lumber into usable wood, and in the field growing trees to harvest for their lumber.

That habit has carried over into my studies as well; I like digging around in the guts of a system to see how it works, and I prefer making things myself to using solutions made by other people. This isn’t a universal trait – just as we didn’t manufacture our own tools in the shop, I don’t build everything from the ground up – but where I can do things myself, I like to.

This website is a decent example of both sides of this coin. The site proper is compiled by Middleman, an excellent site generator for which I have written no code whatsoever, and I use jQuery, a large JavaScript library, for a fair amount of the functionality on the page (such as the category manipulation in the sidebar). However, I wrote all the HTML and CSS by hand, as well as some of the scripting for which I couldn’t find solutions I liked.

I also host this on one of my own machines that I manage myself, including the actual operating system (Arch Linux is my preferred flavor), security, and DNS.

Or at least, I used to.

I live in Utah now, but my server stayed behind in Michigan. One of the side effects of doing things oneself is that when things inevitably break, you’re the responsible party.

Something went wrong on my server, half a country away, and it shut down. In the past, I’ve used my parents as on-site support, but from what I saw going wrong before I lost contact, I don’t think I’ll be able to do that this time.

I tried to continue self-hosting, from my apartment in Utah, but Comcast’s routers are significantly less friendly to this than AT&T’s are. I struggled for a few days, gave up, and am now violating my principles and renting a small server instance from DigitalOcean.

I don’t get very much traffic other than robots, but from watching the server logs I can see that I’ve definitely inconvenienced some real humans during this time. The rented server isn’t running quite perfectly either, and I’m still working out those problems (which is hard to do from memory; I was not very good about backing up my server to a machine I actually had on hand).

So for the small handful of people who came across me while broken, sorry.

Computers are hard. It’s okay to offload work to other people who are more qualified or able than you.

That said, I have learned exactly nothing from all this and plan on going back to pure self-hosting as soon as I get a local machine and a cooperating router with which to do so.

After all, it’s not a real hobby if it never goes wrong!