I spent the last two days trying to switch from my three year old Oneplus 3, to a brand new iPhone 11. I thought I was probably done with expensive phones (I count Oneplus as an expensive purchase), but resigned to giving iOS a chance this time around.

The Oneplus has served as my phone for 33 months now, and has had its fair share of rough usage. The screen broke twice (and got replaced once). Its battery had degraded so much that I didn’t dare go out without carrying a small sling bag with a charger and a power bank in it. Screen-on time would have been somewhere between 50-90 mins. At least it charged fast.

It wasn’t a fast phone by any means anymore too, and I’d gotten used to waiting a few seconds for apps to launch.

The iPhone, is a stark contrast to that. It’s a recent phone with the latest and greatest Apple processor, and things are super fucking fast on it. I am almost in disbelief of how much the battery lasts on this thing. That carry bag isn’t a necessity anymore (though I have gotten used to it - it came in handy a lot more times than it became a hindrance).

In March 2019, I left my job at Tower Research Capital, to take a small break from work and live aimlessly for a while. My mental health had been declining steadily for the last few years, and going away for a while seemed like the only way out.

Disclaimer: I have not worked as a sysadmin anywhere in my professional life, nor do I consider myself to be very good at it.

I’ve self-hosted a small part of my personal infrastructure (IRC bouncer, VPN server, torrent client, etc) for a while now. These services were set up over the course of a week on the tiniest DigitalOcean instance five years ago, never to be touched again for the next three years.

Two years ago, at Hackbeach 2017, Arun Singh gave a small talk on Infrastructure as code and Terraform. Around then, I had recently started frequenting /r/selfhosted, and decided to start self-hosting more of my services. Upon finally logging in into my server after three years, I couldn’t understand anything about the way it was set up. Port 443 seemed to be occupied by OpenVPN (for punching through restrictive firewalls), which proxied HTTP traffic to HAProxy which proxied it to a web server, and so on.