If it’s not your experience, then I would look at your interview skills.

Your resume only gets you a conversation, you have to sell yourself to them.

Are you confident when you interview? Not too confident to be cocky though, but enough that you know what you are talking about if someone were to ask a question.

Ask questions during the interview. Ask them what they like about working there. Act interested and engaged and you will stand out among the rest.

OK, You have a degree

What is your experience like?

What is your field in tech?

What make you senior?

Another important question, where are you located? This can make a huge difference, if you are looking in a small town for senior tech jobs then you aren’t going to get much.

Right now, tech jobs aren’t doing well since companies over hired, then decided to shed those positions. But Senior positions are usually always in demand.

You’ve been looking for work for 3 years? Have you been out of work for 3 years? If you’ve been out of work for 3 years, what type of tech do you do?

Infrastructure? Administrator? Developer? Security?

Have any certifications? HR likes to see those even if they are basic ones.

Since it’s been 3 years, have you been keeping your skills up to date? Tech changes so rapidly, take for example, I completed my AZ-305 2 years ago, since then I’ve had to renew twice and each time the test has new stuff. Azure tech changes constantly.

My current position is Senior Consultant, I got it by leaving a different position and contracting for a few years. A big consulting firm scooped me up on my second contract.

If your server is local, meaning it is on your network, then you connect via the local netowork. If you are both wired, then you’ll likely be connected via 1Gbe. If you server is wired, and you connect wirelessly, you are limited by the wireless connection speed. If your jellyfin server is remote, meaning physically hosted offsite, then you will be limited by your internet speed and the speed of the jellyfin servers connection.

If the connection is local and its dropping, check out your jellyfin servers resources to see bottlenecks. Also see if you can check your tplink router and see if the CPU is spiking.

I’d be hesitant to run it at your own house. While you can use a cloudflare tunnel, I’d never expose anything in my home network to the outside.

Digital ocean is cheap, there’s another called hetzner which looks also pretty cheap. So you start will rent 1 core VPS for 5 bucks, it’s enough to run your own instance but not really enough to host any communities.

How are your Linux skills?

You’ll need a domain name to start. If you plan on hosting any communities, you’ll want to secure it as well, I’d recommend a cloudflare account, use their DNS proxy and then only allow traffic from cloudflare cdns so as not to expose your server directly. You’ll also want to configure the Web application firewall to block bots, known malicious IPs, that kind of stuff. To manage this, you’ll have to host your DNS in cloudflare and create and install an origin certificate on your host server.

If you are comfortable with Linux and command line (you’ll want to know at least the basics to get you by), then you can deploy via ansible. Lemmy has a nice little doc that mostly covers everything.

Feel free to ping me if you have some questions.

Oh and if you are having your instance send mail, you can use the service built in, but it’ll get flagged as spam. You’ll need either a SMTP relay service like sendgrid or SPF records so that receiving email servers can verify its coming from your domain.

I’ve tried using YNAB but I eventually stopped setting it up. I think it was because it didn’t have bi weekly type transactions, or that might have been mint. Both I’ve tried using, both I just couldn’t. Maybe I’ll give it another shot.

Now if I could just actually stick to a budget… I get spendy sometimes and my budget doesn’t like it.