Been there done that. It's much harder than it seems from this post. Your brain suffered severe damage, getting it to work again as good as possible takes huge amounts of energy and will power. Good job bro! (Watch yourself, don't over do it)
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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I've been in a similar position to you. I was in an accident and woke up missing a quarter of my skull.
Props for getting back to servers and code as a part of your recovery. The recovery process for me took a long time and a lot of work. I imagine you are in a similar position and question whether things will ever be the same again, the same way I have. I don't know your particular situation very well, true. But for me, recovery not only took a lot of exercise, balance routines, relearning vocabulary, and a couple of surgeries; but it also took a lot of faith.
Shoot, you mentioned your projects, I did something similar. I found a hypervisor on Craigslist and set up Apache Cloudstack. I pushed myself to learn DevOps skills on it, Jenkins, terraform, cloud-init, and I'm still working on a AWS DevOps Cert.
But I would like to say kudos on your work. I think that doing it during your recovery is an extremely difficult prospect, but I do think that it pays off in the long run.
tldr; I think your recovery is coming along great. You may have quite the ways to go down that road, we don't really know. But until you're fully recovered, you will be in our hearts, minds, and prayers.
I'm in like an inverse of this situation; ol' pappy and grandpappy before him had early onset dementia.
i am trying to get all this set up, backed up, documented and slowly showing my kids how to access and troubleshoot some of the services. it is a race against time!
and a "dead man's" or "brain is melted" switch set up to hand over the keys to the significant other when that time comes.
i am proud to be part of the same group as you though! you're very inspiring.
I hope you get better! Im not active in community, not even a tech savy. I also didnt come up with something to share with community but I like the homelabing hobby (or movement if I can call this like that).
Jellyfin is such a badass app! I borrowed huge DVD's collection from my grandpa (he had a store back in days) so I have like a bunch of movies only on my Pi5 with Radax (wchich is my only homelab device lol).
Again. I hope you get better fellow stranger from the internet!
I had a stroke very young, early career and was paralyzed for a bit. I did something similar to regain function, keep it up. Don't forget to sleep and exercise as you can (exercise bikes are usually safe) they provide a cumulative effect with what you're doing. Feel free to DM if you ever need a chat.
Best of luck in recovery!
Same to you bro
Don’t forget to sleep and exercise
Even mild exercise, like getting out and walking, works wonders for me. Gets all the happy chemicals roused and flowing.
Relearning old abilities after nerve damage is not the most fun I have had. I hope this is something you enjoy. Good luck on your recovery!
My brother....I empathize with your situation. About 25 years ago, I fell from 2 floors up, landed on my skull on a concrete pad and lay there for an undetermined amount of time before someone found me. I suffered a TBI that has gifted me a seizure condition as well as other mental/neuro issues. The right, frontal lobe of my brain looks like a piece of wadded up, cotton candy. I've come a long way and I have far to go. I am fortunate and thankful to be alive regardless the situation.
and short term memory [loss]
I spent a week in the hospital after I had a seizure and it wiped my memory. I didn't know who I was, how to do even simple tasks, or who anyone else was either.
I use selfhosting and computers in general, to do the same thing as you. It keeps me thinking and trying to solve problems. I have problems expressing my thoughts, but the folks here have been patient with all of my silly questions and the occasional inability to grasp the information being presented here at lemmy/selfhosted. I don't watch TV, but I've found structure in reading, and I read a ton of info. I'm more into IT (obviously), history, etc but no fiction.
I truly wish you the very best bro. If I can ever be of assistance, I'm usually around somewhere. We can pair your brain with my .25 brain, and fix something. LOL
keep up the good fight and keep on keeping on!
Sounds like a really good way to keep your mind fresh after a traumatic event like a stroke. It's important to keep your mind busy. Glad to hear you're doing well, and thanks for sharing :)
Love this. Thanks for sharing.
That's one thing I especially like about self hosting: You can do it at your own pace. But at the same time there are almost no limits. With today's technology you can do anything you want.
It helps me if depression hits because you can set your own goals and actually achieve them.
Good luck with everything. Go at your own pace, hosting is just leaving a computer on. Add more things as you need and that's all there is in my opinion. But of course you'll learn security, backups, and other things as you need.
That's amazing and inspiring, good for you! 😊
This sounds like a great idea. I would suggest doing also other things that simulate the brain in other ways, like listening to music (or even playing an instrument), visual stimuli (art, nature), physical motion and coordination activities (dance, sports). You may well already do these things, I just felt I should mention it since our culture is so prone to associating brain with mental logic specifically and forgeting how much these other things involve the brain.
Learning a language is another thing with really strong evidence for brain development /preservation.
like listening to music (or even playing an instrument),
I have found great solace in music. I've been playing stringed instruments since I was 5. I've been a fan of music all of my life. I create music and post on SoundCloud. The benefits of just listening to music I think gets overlooked.
The benefits of just listening to music I think gets overlooked.
Hard agree. And it's a shame because we have more music at our fingertips now than ever before, from every possible time and place in history. I'm from an era (70s) when just putting a record on and listening to it all the way through was a thing, but I'm not sure how many folks realize today that music can be an event in itself: not as background, but as foreground. Putting it on, sitting in a chair, and just listening while doing little to nothing else.
It's hard to get time to do it, but when I do it's heaven. And it absolutely resets my brain in positive ways: afterward, I just feel good. I actually think it might qualify as an ersatz form of meditation, in that a person is not mentally attending anything else while doing this, just listening and letting the auditory experience wash over them. It's difficult to quantify, but the benefits are very real.
Music is the window to the soul and everyone's view is different.
Dude you've made more in 6–8 months than I had the ambition to accomplish for over a decade now, and I haven't even started. (Two kids, there's just no time or energy.)
You're doing great!
You might think your apps aren't worth sharing, but I think most tabletop GMs are constantly looking for the perfect set of tools for their purposes and I bet yours would probably be just what some people need! I mostly end up just using Obsidian and keeping notes in markdown files, but I know some people want/use a lot of other tools.
Congrats on bouncing back from such a hard thing with such vim and vigor! I hope your recovery continues to go well.
And they're still leaps and bounds above anything I can do
You're a real legend, wish you the best
Your dedication to your recovery is so cool. Wish you the best :)
good luck mate, you're on the right path
Wish you a better health, soon
Fellow stroke victim here. Sounds like you're doing great for recovery, rock on
Excuse me for not having too much to say besides everyone else in this thread. I just wanted to check-in and say something that I felt upvoting everyone isn’t enough. Wish you all the recovery you can get, and thank you for inspiring too. You’re doing great, at least your grammar is quite good for the situation. Cheers!
I can totally see how this has a positive impact in cognition and general well-being. Personally, I wouldn't want a day in my life where I consume short form content and giving free reign to all the other behavioural mind-killers.
Props for going down the right path.
Glad it helps to recover. Taking a break from IT and focusIng on sleep, excersise, health is good too.
Well shit.. just on the ripping the optical media.. that is a chore and a half!
Keep on with it, will be delightful to follow your progress and for you, I imagine, it will be glorious.
Glad to hear you are on a positive path for recovery and still finding ways to keep engaged. Your project sounds like a fun one. I'm a "GM" for a niche online gaming community, so your TTRPG app is interesting to me. Would love to see more if you are comfortable sharing it in the future.
Whoa, haven't thought about iGoogle in a minute. I spent the majority of my high school Desktop Publishing class playing Super Mario 2 on an emulator in iGoogle. The only drawback (besides not paying enough attention and being bad with computers now) was that it would refresh randomly, so I had to speed run to get as far as I could before it happened.
Ain't no stroke gonna slow you down, keep up the amazing work!
Inspiring tale, glad you found something you both enjoy and learn from! I think that's a great use of time, to problem solve and develop tools that benefit you day-to-day.
I've had some family that have experienced strokes, ranging from a slight scare to full on life-changing. You're certainly doing well if you're writing your own apps, I can barely script BASH.
Nice, good luck!