I’ve had a great experience with the TrueNAS Mini-X system I bought. ZFS has great raid options, and TrueNAS makes managing a system really easy. You can get a box built & configured by them, with 16 GB ECC RAM and five (empty) drive bays, for about $1150 at the most affordable end. https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/

One thing to be careful about: you can’t add drives to a ZFS vdev once it’s been created, but you can add new vdevs to an existing pool. So, you can start with two mirrored drives, then add another two mirrored drives to that pool later.

(A vdev is a sub-unit of a ZFS storage pool, and you have to choose your RAID topology for each vdev and then compose those into a storage pool)

The common wisdom about backups is the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which recommends:

• 3 total copies of your data, including your original or “production” data
• 2 different forms of media
• 1 off-site copy

Proton Drive can be a decent off-site backup, but it would be a good idea to make a separate backup of your data on a different form of media like an external hard drive, just in case Proton Drive goes down, or the data there gets corrupted and you need to restore a known good version.

What worked for me is learning some better letterforms from some free images from the Write Now book (by Getty-Dubay) on italic cursive. It’s a different kind of cursive from the awkward one I was taught in school, and it’s a lot easier to write and read.

I think the biggest improvement in my handwriting was just finding letterforms in that book that are both easy to write but that are also more clearly distinguishable when you write quickly. For example, just putting a little curl at the bottom of my lowercase T’s, I’s, and L’s made them a lot more aesthetically pleasing but also more clearly distinct from other letters.

Once you find some letterforms like that, it just takes a little practice to rewrite your muscle memory.

Learning new programming languages is an awesome way to expand your programming brain. If you want to stay in the same scientific computation niche, you can check out Julia or Mathematica. If you’re just looking to broaden your horizons, the world is your oyster. For me, learning Clojure really cooked my noodle but made me a much better programmer since it taught me functional programming.

Also, just read other peoples code! You can learn the conventions that way. Though for you it would best to find other products within your niche, because I’m not sure if general web dev code would be super helpful.

There are techniques that are broader than any single language’s conventions, and I think learning those are how you can improve. That’s hard to teach, though, and it comes from experience with a few different languages, in my opinion.

And honestly, I can totally respect the “conventions be damned” attitude, because at the end of the day, you’re trying to make something that works, and if nobody else is reading that code, you’ve made the right trade-off.

I’ll suggest Elixir. It’s a language that runs on the same virtual machine as Erlang, which has proven to be great for ultra-reliable and excellent at managing many, MANY concurrent processes.

Elixir itself builds upon this great foundation with a syntax similar to Ruby, but entirely functional. It’s a delightful language to read and write.

There’s no way of knowing if anything we’ve determined via science is “correct,” we’ve just developed a model that is consistent with our observations. There are still plenty of unanswered questions in astronomy.

One of the all-time classics! I think all devs should read this.

If you’re interested in setting up another program, you can use Overseerr to feed requests to Sonarr. Other people who have access your plex library can also use it to request stuff from you, but even if you’re a solo user, it’s a nice interface to search and add content with.

ixSystems sells pre-built machines running TrueNAS. They’re a little pricier than building on from scratch of course, but they have ECC ram and have everything set up out of the box. Funds also support the development of TrueNAS. I got one earlier this year and I love it. Fussing around in the web UI requires some technical know-how, but if you get it set up for them, I expect it to run like a dream.

Other posters have described what Radar and Sonarr do, I just want to say having all the apps set up along with Overseerr is a game-changer, even if your setup is only for your own consumption and you’re not sharing your plex library with anyone. Overseerr lets you log in with Plex and request content, and it’ll add the content to *arr, which will automatically search torrent sites (I use Prowlarr for that), download the content, then move them to your media library and update Plex.

If you do share your plex library with friends, and can put Overseerr somewhere they can access it, then your friends can request to add content to your library, and you just have to click “Approve” to start the search & download process.

It takes a little time to set up, but once it’s up and running, it’s lovely.

I use it to organize my notes for the Dungeons and Dragons game I’m playing in. It’s fabulous for linking NPCs and locations with my notes for each session.