Where to Go from Here: 12 Projects, the Communities Worth Joining, and How to Keep Learning

A hundred and sixty tutorials in, the server installs itself from a playbook, backs up to three places, monitors its own drives, serves the household's files, photos, music, passwords, notes and recipes, and sends you a report on Monday. The series is done; the hobby isn't. Here's what's worth doing next, where the people who do it hang out, and the habits that matter more than any single tutorial.

1. Music Assistant — ties Navidrome (84), Snapcast (154), Spotify and every speaker in the house into one Home Assistant-native player.
2. A second site-to-site (108) to a friend's house, with mutual restic targets (116): two people backing each other up for free.
3. Kubernetes, small — k3s on three Pis, for understanding what the big outfits do; most home servers don't need it, and knowing why is worth the weekend.
4. A proper firewall — OPNsense or OpenWrt as the router, with VLANs (143) and IDS, instead of the ISP box.
5. A mail server for real (138) on a VPS — or the opposite: migrate the family off a provider onto Fastmail with your domain and never think about it again.
6. Self-hosted AI, properly (78) — a used GPU, Open WebUI with document search over Paperless (76) and BookStack (88): "when did we last service the boiler?" answered by your own documents.
7. Your own app (102, 110) — the thing nobody's built: a Flask page for the allotment rota, a Node bot for the family's Matrix (126). Dockerised, proxied, backed up like everything else.
8. Nextcloud → the full suite — Talk, Deck, Forms, Collabora (121): a small business's Google Workspace, on one box.
9. A NAS-grade storage rebuild — ZFS raidz2 (97) on four drives with an SSD special vdev, scheduled scrubs, snapshots sent nightly to the relative's box.
10. Automated OS lifecycle — Ubuntu autoinstall over netboot (153) feeding the Ansible playbook (140): a machine from blank to joined in one unattended boot.
11. Observability all the way — Grafana (90) + Loki (155) + Tempo traces for your own app, with an SLO dashboard. Overkill at home; exactly what the job wants.
12. Teach someone — set up a Pi for a parent or a friend with Pi-hole, Immich and a backup to your server. You'll learn more fixing their problems than your own.

• r/selfhosted and r/homelab — the biggest; search before posting, the question has been asked. r/homelab is hardware-heavy; r/selfhosted is software.
• Awesome-Selfhosted (GitHub) — the catalogue of everything you could host, by category. The "what else exists" list.
• The LinuxServer.io, Home Assistant and Immich forums/Discords — the projects' own communities answer their own app's questions far better than Reddit.
• selfh.st (newsletter) — weekly roundup of new releases and projects; Marius Hosting and noted.lol for app walkthroughs.
• Local Linux user groups and makerspaces — people with spare hardware and opinions.
• Hacker News for the broader conversation; ignore the parts about funding rounds.

Tutorial 80's recipe: OS version, what you expected, what happened, the exact error, twenty lines of log, what changed, what you tried. Strip secrets. Post it in the project's own forum first. A question with that shape gets answered within the hour; "it doesn't work" doesn't.

Every app in this series has docs that are better than any tutorial about it, including these. The habit: when something's new, read the project's Getting started and its Configuration reference once, even the boring parts. Then the tutorials make sense and you can tell when they're out of date. man pages (10) for the Linux side; --help for everything else; the compose file in the project's own README is the one to trust.

• The Linux Command Line (Shotts) — free online; the proper version of tutorial 10.
• UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook — the big one; a chapter when you need it.
• Docker Deep Dive (Poulton) — what's underneath tutorials 24–25.
• Site Reliability Engineering (Google, free online) — overkill, and the chapters on monitoring and postmortems will change how you think about tutorial 159.

• Monday report (156), read. Monthly ten minutes (39, 71). Yearly drill (159).
• Change one thing, note it in BookStack (88) or the commit message (103). "What changed?" is always the question.
• Backups before upgrades, snapshots when you can (97, 81).
• Pin versions for anything with migrations (50); read release notes for the big apps.
• Don't expose what the VPN can reach. Every open port is a decision, written down (6, 39, 109).
• Measure before buying (157, 119). The SSD is usually the answer; the new box usually isn't yet.
• Keep the series' numbers handy: 40 (cheat sheet), 80 (troubleshooting), 120 (glossary) — and this page.

Pick one project from the list and give it a weekend. Join one community and answer a question there before you ask one. Keep the Monday report coming. The server you've built will run for a decade with those habits — and the skills you've picked up along the way are the same ones that run the rest of the internet.