I was 7 and I found a booklet for BASIC programming language that came with my C64. I was fucking ecstatic that I could just write words and make computer go brrrr. My first project was my school schedule in a form of a table created with n number of print statements. I felt like a fucking wizard.
I do self-host some services but it bugs me that a lot of articles that talk about costs do not factor in a lot of additional costs. Drives for NAS need replacement. Running NUCs means quite an energy draw compared to most ARM based SBCs.