Supercrunchy

So, HTTPS prevents people on the network from hijacking the connection or spying on what you do with the website or your passwords. If you have a VPN and no evil devices inside your network you are likely fine, and many things don’t need HTTPS-level of safety.

That said, browsers make using HTTP almost unusable nowadays, because over the internet you really want your connection to not be hyjacked, and almost nobody self-hosts (sadly).

I would reccommend to set up a reverse proxy to do https for all services you host, even if you only use it via lan/vpn. Adding a new service then becomes just hosting it over HTTP, and have your reverse proxy converting the connection to HTTPS.

If you have a domain, you can request a wildcard cert from let’s encrypt and use that also for internal domains (they don’t need to be reachable from the public internet, but you might need to expose the ACME challenge file).

If you want to learn a lot about certificates you can go the self-signed route, but you’ll have to install the certificate on every device you use to access your services (guests will get huge warnings when trying to access your pages, if you give them access to them). Once set up it’s more flexible though, and if you configure your dns server you can have whatever domain you want, even nonexistent or unavailable ones.

You probably misunderstood the parent’s message.

From what I can see online, there are 2 kinds of expert programmers:

• some care only about the problem being solved, and not how. They’ll go out and about saying AI is amazing, because they can just prompt and get something mostly working out of it. If they’d have to solve a sudoku for work, they’d ask the sudoku-solving machine to solve it and be happy about it, because they solved the problem.
• some care about how to solve the problem and not exactly the problem being solved. Architecture, code quality and process is the part that gives satisfaction. They see coding as solving a sudoku, and the joy is finding a smart solution, not having the sudoku solved at the end. If the code quality can’t be kept, then they’d ask to change the problem being solved. AI is a disaster for them.

I’m definitely part of the second camp btw. AI enables the first kind of people to go wild and generate slop code, while at the same time removing the joy they find in programming. Work is becoming horrible for me, because AI destroyed any satisfaction I have when coding