Fun! I just put together my own phone exchange at home using Asterisk. It can be challenging to configure but LLMs can help a lot with this in my experience.
My father had a an old HP Vectra 286. Somehow I found the 5.25 floppies with QBasic 4.5 and the manuals and just started experimenting with it. I must have been around 11-12 years old. When I was 14 and doing work experience in system administrator I got a Free sad CD. That started my Unix journey.
I host my companys website on Cloudflare pages using Cloudflare's DNS. I don't want to move to 100% self hosting but I would like to have self hosted backup. Has anyone solved this?
A good place to start programming assembly are on micro controllers (Arduino etc.). They have a more limited set of instructions, registers etc, and an easy to grasp memory layout. The development environments also often come with a pretty good debugger/simulator so you can step through your code and we how it works.
A thought: I guess the days of scratch off lottery tickets are numbered?