I resisted setting up automation for my home lab for the longest time, partly because I wanted to manually do the process repeatedly, so that it would sink in to help with learning. That meant I skipped out on handy CLI tools for one-line fixes, but I was focusing on the wrong aspect of setup. If I had to go back again, I’d learn automation tools like Terraform, Ansible, and Packer from the start, because the paradigm shift of seeing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) takes longer if you’re already mired in a particular way of working.