What is the trait in certain people (most here I would guess) that makes these kinds of projects....fun. No, not fun, thats not the right word. Necessary? Appealing? Rewarding?<p>I went through my own journey to get an understanding with k8s, in a homelab setting. It started with MicroK8s on a VM running on a 2011 macbook pro I had lying around. That was painful, but I eventually had something useful running, until it weirdly self combusted one day and weeks of hard work resulted in ssh failing to connect because the K8s instance seemed to have deleted itself from the VM. I think it was trying to tell me something.<p>I decided to persist, but this time with k3s, and no VM on an outdated Mac. Instead I went with an outdated HP Thinclient. A bargain on ebay, with extra RAM. That worked much better. Now I have a bunch of great self hosted software for home media, development servers, git repos, docker servers, CI/CD pipelines. With storage managed by a NAS. All managed via simple helm charts. It's really useful. I discovered Tailscale along the way, that opened up a whole new world of self hosting abilities.<p>I get the nerd sniping, I've seen k8s abused in work situations too, but underneath it, people just wanted to learn.<p>I had a similar situation recently trying to bake shokupan for the first time. There was a new bread maker. It made perfect rising normal bread. But trying the Shokupan recipe produced a damp brick. A total failure. I persisted, read a ton of recipes and blogs, watched countless youtube videos. I was convinced it was an equipment or method issue. Eventually, 3 damp bricks later, I realised the yeast was out of date. This was the first thing people recommended to check, but I thought I knew better because "it worked on my machine" with the normal bread. Anyway, the 4th attempt with new yeast produced a perfect loaf. And I learnt a ton of other useful info for baking great bread along the way. The elation when it finally worked, and I had amazing fluffy home made bread, was a very similar sense of reward and accomplishment to finally getting some program or system to work.