I have spent the last two years learning about galls on plants as well as botany (mainly Oaks). I even built a website for helping ID and catalog the various gall forming species that occur across the US and Canada. https://www.gallformers.org
My main techniques for learning have been internet resources, https://www.inaturalist.org, https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/ , and sci-hub being indispensable. I also have built up a decent library of related books, though there are very few relating to galls mostly they are botany related.
This hobby has led me to become a much better photographer (this is one of my recent favorites https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/96982552) and gets me outside wandering around in nature at every opportunity that I have. My own yard, the neighborhood park, county/state/national parks, all of them offer nearly limitless exploration opportunity.
I have been at it for about 18 months and I feel like I am competent but am acutely aware of just how much more there is to learn, which is for me one of the main appeals.
Erroneous 503s. I would get a 503 on every call. Uploading a single file with a single call would immediately 503. I never once got a successful upload. I simply switched the endpoint URL and credentials over to AWS S3 and it worked first time so it was not my code (though I suppose it could have been an issue in the library AWS's node S3 client). My theory was the request was somehow malformed based on what DO was expecting and it was returning a 503 rather than a 400. But the request did work with S3.
I tried, and tried to use Spaces for image hosting related to a site that I am building but it never worked for me. DigitalOcean support was responsive but useless. I got the same basic response over and over again for days on end. I did finally get a response acking my problem and that it would be assigned to an Engineer. The ticket was then closed the next day with no further comment. I re-opened it and asked about the status of the engineer looking at the issue and received back the same response I had already heard nearly a dozen times. I then re-closed the ticket, deleted my Space, and went back to AWS. :(
I had heard good things about DigitalOcean, but I would not use them or recommend them to anyone after that experience. The one primary issue I had was a showstopper but there was a lot of other bugginess.
My main techniques for learning have been internet resources, https://www.inaturalist.org, https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/ , and sci-hub being indispensable. I also have built up a decent library of related books, though there are very few relating to galls mostly they are botany related.
This hobby has led me to become a much better photographer (this is one of my recent favorites https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/96982552) and gets me outside wandering around in nature at every opportunity that I have. My own yard, the neighborhood park, county/state/national parks, all of them offer nearly limitless exploration opportunity.
I have been at it for about 18 months and I feel like I am competent but am acutely aware of just how much more there is to learn, which is for me one of the main appeals.