I've tried for 15 years to have my homelab, but always get lost in the complexity after a year or so, in the past. About 3 years ago I gave NixOS a try instead for managing everything, which suddenly made everything easier (counter-intuitively perhaps) as now I can come back after months and still understand where everything is and how it works after just reading.

Setting up Forgejo + runners declaratively is probably ~100 lines in total, and doesn't matter I forget how it works, just have to spend five minutes reading to catch up after I come back in 6 months to change/fix something.

I think the trick to avoid getting tired of it is trying to just make it as simple as humanly possible. The less stuff you have, the easier it gets, at least that's intuitive :)

> When I’ve been fixing broken systems at work all day I don’t really want to have to be my own sysadmin too.

There’s only one solution to this.

Quit your job.

With the help of coding agents it's easier than ever. Just get Claude/Codex to create Helm Charts / Docker Compose files for you. Struggle with some command line juggling to fix some obscure error? An agent can mostly help you in no-time.

There isn't much work or maintenance to do really. When you are the sole user everything is over sized and if it is only accessible at home you can be lazy with updates and security anyway.