I like to program as a hobby (though I also do it as a professional, so I get a lot of paid time to learn this stuff too) and so much stuff is just freely available online. Tutorials, documentation, tools, whatever, mostly open-source which means free to use and play with as you please.

You can make web pages with nothing but a text editor and any one of a million guides on web programming. Just put HTML code in a text file and open it in your browser, and bam you’ve got a web page. You can gradually learn stuff like CSS and JavaScript to make them look neat and do cool stuff. Then you can use GitHub Pages to deploy your pages to the internet for other people to see and use. Or learn a programming language like Python to build a web server that serves up that HTML you learned. You don’t need a beefy machine at all to write code.

I’ll throw in another vouch for simple Zigbee buttons, if you don’t want to mess with rewiring or installing new light switches. The Thirdreality buttons work great and are super affordable.

I’m running Prosody and it was easy to set up and the docs are good.

That’s fair

Matrix is an option but it’s slow and breaks all the time. I’m a big fan of XMPP myself but good luck convincing anyone else to make an account 😔

Assassin’s Creed 2:

“It’s-a me, Mario!”