The Solarpunk Druid (@solarpunkdruid.solarpunkdruid.com.ap.brid.gy)

It has been roughly 3 years since I got my little mini pc box to use as a home server. With so much of life running through online services I wanted to see how much I could reasonably extract myself from hosted companies that extract data from us and push manipulative algorithms on us in turn […]

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The Joy of Learning Through Failure It has been roughly 3 years since I got my little mini pc box to use as a home server. With so much of life running through online services I wanted to see how much I could reasonably extract myself from hosted companies that extract data from us and push manipulative algorithms on us in turn. I also wanted to just be able to tinker again. That odd little joy of trying something out. Running into problems and chipping away at it for the feeling of triumph of figuring out something complex for myself. In many ways, my DIY home server stuff fails upwards. I’m not great at networking stuff. IP addresses and domains and DNSs still largely confound me. That’s why I went for an easy option, sticking yunohost on my little pc. It’s made to hide most of the hard and complicated stuff, so that people with minimal to intermediate knowledge can just host thier own stuff by clicking install on app from a catalogue. This is great, but I chafe at not being able to do things exactly how I want to do them. So being little ol’ ADHD brain me, I peek under the hood and see if I can tweek things. and I know just enough to make me dangerous but not enough to truly understand the things I am doing. And so many times I have screwed up and one of the apps, or the whole server, has stopped working and I’ve had to scramble about googling error messages to see if I can put things right. And each time I’ve learnt a little more. It’s the same with my garden. Last September I moved into a shared house and we have a garden now. I’ve never had a garden before, but I knew one thing. I wanted to replace the grass lawn with a clover one. And I have learnt harsh lessons. Lessons, like don’t try and change your garden right before winter. But through the failure I have learnt, and am learning, how to work with plants and soil and local fauna. It is so common to view failure as a source of misery and frustration. But I think there’s also a joy to be found in failure too. A joy of learning and growth. https://solarpunkdruid.com/solarpunk-article/the-joy-of-learning-through-failure/