I don’t think the durability of data is affected in your examples. All of my external USB disks are kinda old but they run on type-B; the ones with additional power will probably have a faster spin. If running on USB type-C then that may not be an issue either.

Little bit by myself, mainly some puzzle stuff in the browser. Turns out I really enjoy writing code than making games.

I don’t think this is a good answer but a funny anecdote. I was pretty obsessed with video games starting with the NES. I got really good with computers, programming, etc and more than 10 years into being a professional software developer, I figured it was time to actually look at making a game, arguably the reason I got into coding to begin with. Turns out that so little about game development is actually coding these days, been that way for decades now.

There are so many parts to making a video game, as you mentioned. If you want to do everything yourself and from scratch, yeah you will need to understand code and physics/math formulas, etc. Maybe some graphic design for the world you’re creating, maybe some music and audio effects knowledge. But there are also game engines out there that will do virtually or literally all of this for you.

I guess my real point is, figure out what you enjoy doing, and how you can contribute that to making games. It doesn’t matter if you’re good at it or don’t even know where to start, the important part is that you do start and stick with it.

I don’t consider an app deployable until I can run a single script and watch it run. For instance I do not run docker/podman containers raw, always with a compose and/or other orchestration. Not consciously but I probably kill and restart it several times just to be sure it’s reproducible.

My entire music library must pass through beets first. If it’s not automatically tagged I will manually search, and finally (esp for locals’ or friends’ music) I will manually tag it using eyeD3 and import through beets as l-is.

I think most home lab/shelf hosters start off because they want to learn something. I think (generally, philosophically) many people never start something new even if it interests them because they are afraid. To this point, it sounds like you can either let the fear prevent you from doing what you want, or you can use the fear as a learning tool.

Start simple. Build something very easy and isolated, air gap it if you need to. Figure out how logs and monitoring work, maybe even try attacking it yourself, so you have confidence that even if it’s compromised you will see how and why. Then you can connect it to the internet, isolated from the rest of your network, and then you will learn how well- or un-founded those fears are. Learn even more about monitoring and defending, then start looking for a job as a cybersecurity professional because you are already well underway.

They don’t have to succeed once.

Use antivirus and other endpoint security measures. Rotate your passwords and keys. Use Everything as Code, and for goodness sake make backups.

If you find yourself compromised, rotate and burn the keys, wipe and redeploy.

I have a much older NAS with not a lot of compute power, but it’s only purpose is to share data. I have a a proxmox server that connects to the NAS through NFS and does the actual transcoding, etc.

If you are trying to access several different services through the internet to your home network, you are better off setting up a home VPN than trying to manage multiple public facing services. The more you publish directly to the public, the more difficult it is to keep up with everything; It is likely needlessly expanding your threat exposure. Plus you never know when a new exploit gets published against any of the services you have available.