todotoro

A Pi 4 can do quite a bit. Maybe start off with some Docker apps. Try and host PiHole for ad blocking at home?

Video games come to mind. You could probably figure out how to host a game server of their choice (think something like Minecraft) so him and his friends can play. Docker is a nice shortcut for that, and you also get to sprinkle in some networking knowledge too for opening ports and such.

If games are off the table, could try to figure out some hardware to interact with. Having some sort of robot that you can control with an API could be fun.

On the line with hardware, you can get a raspberry pi, and try to work with him to blink an LED via Scratch or Python. Then work to something even bigger.

If typing is a struggle you could do typeracer or something like that to figure out who can type faster.

You could build a basic website together with some CSS and HTML. Make like, a fan site for his favorite band (or whatever hes into). Maybe he wants to make something for his friends to see.

Or, ask them if there is something theyve wanted to know how it works…then build some sort of project using it.

Great link and good point. Subbed, ty for sharing. ( I’ll believe what a NetNavi says about AI anyday).

If you decide to go the Kubernetes route, you can try k3sup to bootstrap your VMs k3s, it a nice half step abstraction between Ansible and running curl yourself:

https://github.com/alexellis/k3sup

I’ve landed on k3s as my k8s distro in my environment for a number of reasons. It seems to have the “mindshare” of selfhosters, and theres lots of k3s documentation to peruse. I also really like that you can preload manifest files if you do decide to use Ansible, which makes cluster deploys that much more organized.

If you want to go a little off beat, you could try “Canonical K8s (not Microk8s)” as a snap. That worked REALLY well, and lets you do cool shit like “k8s enable loadbalancer” to automatically enable whole components for you, if you just want to focus on “consuming” Kubernetes instead of building it. I did notice a little overhead doing it as a snap, but my Proxmox node that runs the VM is purposely low spec (Celeron quad core if you believe it, 7 tdp tho)…so your hardware wouldn’t likely notice a difference.

https://documentation.ubuntu.com/canonical-kubernetes/release-1.32/snap/tutorial/getting-started/

If youre doing Proxmox already, if you don’t already have a VM template and/or Terraform/OpenTofu with Proxmox operator…it may help to tool on that too. Easier to destroy/build VMs when you get frustrated.