Building and hosting your own smart home or tech project can bring professional lessons that can be taken back to the shop.
Whether you own a business or work in a more traditional role, there is more to gain from building technology than just a paycheck or home automation. Learning AWS or other cloud native tools is great, but beyond learning a programming language, we also teach ourselves that we are capable of accomplishing something challenging and complex. Completing complex projects, such as cloud-native based projects, can change our minds and our lives. Let's explore some of the ways that completing tech projects can help us learn and grow.
1. Expand your horizons.
- Every time we complete a project, we realize that we can take on bigger tasks, increasing our confidence and skills.
- Start with a small, easy project that looks fun or interesting in some way.
2. Develop pattern recognition.
- Identify tasks that are easy to reproduce and apply knowledge from one project to the next.
- Try using something like Terraform to make a structure or outcome easier to reproduce.
- Automate tasks that must be done routinely from the learning experience.
3. Build reusable assets.
- Completing code projects provides us with usable assets that we can employ for future ideas.
- Try using the same load balancing configurations to host a completely different automation tool or solution.
4. Hands-on learning.
- Building your own open-source smart home or tech project is an excellent way to learn by doing.
- Home projects like banking and security are better done ourselves for security and privacy reasons.
- Home Assistant works well with Docker on any spare computer or server.
- Using existing open-source resources can help you get started without being too challenging.
5. Take control.
- Building your own open-source smart home project lets you be in control of decisions.
- Decide whether to add popular tools or stick with self-hosted solutions for your home goals.
- When code manages the world around us, we can experience the value of code as an asset.
