Great… can’t wait for politicians to use this as a way to pass “common sense” legislation banning 3D printers.

Used business desktop from eBay is what I run. With what you want to run, you’ll be fine with even 10 year old hardware. I’m running a dozen services on 10 year old basic business hardware with no issues. With regards to media though: if you’re not getting a dedicated GPU, get a Intel 7xxx or later CPU so you have Quick sync for transcoding.

I run Ubuntu Server on one, proxmox on another. Both have their pros and cons. Depends on what you want to do. If your plan is just to run everything in containers (and it should be), Ubuntu with docker is plenty. If you plan on playing around with VMs, go proxmox.

As for what services, here’s a huge list of different self hostable services grouped by category/function: https://awesome-selfhosted.net/ Most have a demo site or a quick install guide for docker that makes it easy to try stuff out.

Avoid selfhosted email if you can… it’s a whole different animal.

Been a team lead in title at my company (small software company, out of the start up phase, but was a startup when I joined)) for over a decade. Only figured out how to be a leader in reality over the last 5ish years.

Do you want the title of team lead, or to actually be a leader on your team? Those are often two different things.

Getting the title depends a lot on the politics of your employer. A good place will promote based on merit, others won’t.

Being an actual leader is actually a lot more straightforward: serve the team. Be the driving force behind improving their work lives. That means communicating with them regularly both about what they are finding difficult (and then being a driver in finding a solution) and celebrating them when things go well. It means being a champion for the good ideas others have. It also means asking for help from the team when it’s needed; stay humble.

Through this constant communication a couple of things should start to happen:

• you’ll be able to piece things (solutions, product improvements, bug fixes, etc) more quickly, because your domain and contextual knowledge will be greater than those not serving the team.
• other team members will start coming to you for things, people will naturally gravitate toward those that have proven to be helpful
• the team will start outputting higher quality product
• life for the team will get more enjoyable

Do all that and people will start naturally looking to you.