Classes
I teach one hands-on course: building your own private cloud, from a single line in a hosts file to a running production stack you own. Free, self-paced, on the village classroom.
I have been fixing computers on Kauaʻi’s North Shore for a long time, and the same thing keeps happening on house calls. I fix the immediate problem — the slow Mac, the dead WiFi, the printer — and then somebody asks the real question: could I just run this myself?
Usually the answer is yes, and usually nobody has ever laid it out end to end. So I wrote it down properly.
Building Your Personal Cloud
From Hosts File to Production Stack. A hands-on course that starts with one line in a text file and finishes with a self-hosted server you own: your files, your calendar, your contacts, your backups — running on hardware in your house, with nobody else holding the keys.
It is the written version of the class I have run in person at Anini Beach, and it covers the same ground at your own pace.
- 25 lessons, worked through in order, each one building on the last
- 6 quizzes along the way so you can tell whether it landed
- 1 practical assignment — you build the thing
- Earns the Personal Cloud badge on completion
- Free, self-paced, nothing expires
What it covers
The path runs from name resolution and networking basics, through containers and reverse proxies, into storage, file sync, calendars and contacts, and out the other side into the parts most guides skip: certificates, backups you have actually tested, and monitoring that tells you when something has stopped rather than when it has crashed.
I do not assume you have done any of this before. I do assume you are willing to type things and read what comes back.
What it does not cover
It will not make you a systems administrator, and it does not pretend to. It gets one real stack running and teaches you enough to keep it running. If you want the bigger picture — automation, AI workflows, distributed infrastructure — that lives on Robot Trainer, which is where the deeper technical work happens.
How to enrol
The course lives on the village classroom at class.mycomputertherapy.com, which I run for all three of my properties.
- Create a free account — email address, confirm the link it sends you.
- Open the course and click Enrol me. There is no key and no cost.
- Start at lesson one. Your progress saves as you go.
You can also read the whole course as a guest first, without creating anything, if you would rather look before you sign up.
Prefer to do it with me in the room?
Some people learn this best sitting next to somebody. If you would rather I set the stack up with you — on your hardware, in your house, with you doing the typing — that is a house call, and it is one of my favourite kinds.
Also on the classroom
The classroom is shared across the family. Alongside this course you will find:
- Kauaʻi Digital Village — village orientation, role tracks for shopkeepers, guides and creators, and island courses on reef safety and Hawaiian plant medicine.
- Robot Trainer — three courses on automation and AI agents: when to automate and when not to, shipping your first reliable workflow, and briefing and checking an AI agent.
One account works for all of them.