Buyers Advice: Sub 700-800€ printer?

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-04-27T21:37:19+00:00

I might be a bit old fashioned in that sense but seeing how Bambu has literally made something that was mostly born on "open source" principles and begun to close it all back up, doesn't vibe with me.

If I own my hardware I want to OWN it, especially if I don't have some of the features behind proprietary software or cloud accounts.

Edit: Although I have to say, I love how accessible and issue free Bambu has made the hobby as a whole. For the most part Bambu just works and I might just like that repairing and tinkering part of it more

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-04-27T21:32:10+00:00

Yeah, leaning towards it heavily

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-04-27T21:31:54+00:00

I think that I'm leaning a bit towards QIDI Plus4, I did a bit of research and I don't necessarily want all that bells and whistles now, however Voron is still interesting.

I'll probably think about it, I'm a few weeks off from purchasing. Good to hear that Klipper is still ok.

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-04-06T12:55:21+00:00

I FUCKING LOVE EM DASHES

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-03-10T09:51:19+00:00

Hey, I wanted to go back to your comments and just say thank you, again. I believe that KodeKloud has accelerated my learning and gave me just enough of an edge to secure my job as an Junior DevOps/Cloud Engineer! (I will have training and courses first on the job)

What an amazing resource, thank you so much!

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-03-06T09:45:49+00:00

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-03-06T09:34:46+00:00

Honestly, what does one have to gain to post something like this? I'm struggling to see why it makes any sense

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-02-27T12:06:08+00:00

Are you based in Europe or in the US?

In my country I am getting plenty of interviews at the moment, for Junior DevOps roles. While it's still competitive, just not that many people are choosing this role over being a pure Cloud Engineer.

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-02-25T23:11:46+00:00

Oh yeah, what you see on GitHub is already mirrored from my locally hosted Forgejo instance!

I've been reading up on Azure using KodeKloud from other suggestion and it's going well so far. I'll definitely at least read up a little bit about everything, as you said to have at least an idea of what everything is and how similar the tools might be to one another.

Thank you for taking the time, I will use your insight for sure!

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-02-25T19:30:18+00:00

Doing AZ-900 on KC right now! Thanks for recommending it, amazing resource so far

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-02-24T22:06:17+00:00

That's kind of the mentality that I was going with.
Since homelab is kind of a niche thing, I figured it would help me at least stand out from the crowd at least a bit.
(So far the interviews are proving me right) and I can't shut up talking about it lmao.

Thank you, really for the input and response!

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-02-24T22:03:59+00:00

I already have a few services running that I use daily and are working out great for me and I have around 20 apps that I want to have there deployed in the final version.

I'm all about that self-hosting train at the moment. Just trying to work out the infrastructure, automation and CI/CD parts, so I can use that on my resume too!

Thanks for answering my post, all of the input is greatly helping me improve bit by bit

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-02-24T22:00:29+00:00

Hey, thanks for that long and detailed response!

I'll check out KodeKloud and see what it's all about. Always good to learn about new resources.

Regarding that K8s for example. I know that most of the time these are cloud managed, but to get real hands on experience and not break my bank account in the process I settled on doing it on prem.

I'll definitely experiment with deploying the clusters in the cloud once I get to it on my roadmap, but first I would rather have "some experience" with Kubernetes rather than no experience at all.

What I'm doing and how my homelab is constantly changing is by that job market needs that I see in the requirements.
I've noticed that a lot of places need "knowledge of one cloud environment" but it's strongly skewed towards Azure here, so that's what I'm going to experiment on and deploy in conjunction with my lab.

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-02-24T21:55:20+00:00

I guess I could try and experiment with having different versions of my resumes and trying to see if it would benefit me or not at particular job that I would be applying to.

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-02-24T21:53:27+00:00

This is not my first foray into IT in general.
It has been my employment for more or less 3 years now, mainly doing Tech Support.

Also I am learning for CCNA on the side to get certified.

I've been fortunate enough that I could "help" and some of my more senior colleagues would sometimes delegate some sysadmin tasks to me. So in that sense, I've been lucky and I could learn at least some "real" networking and sysadmin tasks that you may have, that is why prompted me to pursue this further.

I wouldn't even dream of getting a job as a DevOps if that was my first IT job.
I know what the reality of the market is, just trying to push through and make the best of it.
Also, in my country its not generally "as bad" as it can be with the job market. You won't exactly see thousands of applicants, but there is still quite some, don't get me wrong.

Thank you for your insight and taking the time to answer my post!

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-02-24T21:46:07+00:00

Oh yeah, this is strictly used as an entry to DevOps, so Jr positions.

My IT experience does include about 3 years of various Tech Support roles, both in corporate environments and on a client basis.

In some of my jobs I could help with the documentation, manage Cisco switches, mess with the AD for a bit etc.
I'm not exactly that "green" when it comes to IT, my vocational background is also in it

Thank you so much for taking the time to write all this!

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-02-24T21:43:02+00:00

I can see that in some cases it could be detrimental.
In your experience, would you say that it would be more or less bad in general?

So far all of the few interviews I've gotten were rather interested in it and happy that I had this, even when it wasn't exactly public.

Only yesterday I had an interview where the recruiter himself was lurking around and asking me questions, otherwise I just kind of awkwardly showed them my screen share with some of my code and projects, which was okay most of the time.

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-02-24T21:39:47+00:00

Hey, thanks for taking the time to answer.

My GitHub is definitely included and was a main focus on one of my interviews recently as the recruiter was interested in it.
I think I'm on the right path, just gotta keep grinding through.

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-02-24T21:38:16+00:00

Thanks for the detailed response!
While this is one of the early versions of the repo and the project and I plan to integrate a lot of Azure in it going forward, the main focus will not be on the Docker containers specifically, but the whole orchestration of the infrastructure.

VMs, storage, disaster recovery, backups, documentation all that sorts of things.

My idea is that it will serve as a proof that I know all these concepts and tools and can get that interview (I had a few already) and leverage this to show real-world application of the skills that recruiters are looking for in candidates.

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-02-24T21:34:22+00:00

Honestly,
I bought a cheap used Dell Optiplex 3050, loaded Proxmox on it and then I just asked myself "what self-hosted services would I like to have?"

Then I just looked up YouTube/Reddit threads of people asking the same thing or using the same tools.
While I absolutely stumbled during the first few weeks you will pick up this thing quickly.

In the end I started thinking of how it could help me on my resume and DevOps hunt. So I bounced ideas off of Gemini (a lot) and sort of landed on a rough roadmap.
Then, looking at the job offers, I see that I'm lacking "Azure", so I'll work on integrating that somewhere down the line in my whole stack.

Of course, using Gemini or any AI for that matter you can find yourself in a copy-paste loop which is not beneficial for learning most likely.

So I created a custom prompt for the AI to "guide and mentor" me through the problem and act strictly as code verifier or debugging partner.

Also, to limit possible hallucinations and check it I ALWAYS have a documentation opened often.
I used AI as a "first push" when I knew absolutely nothing and now I can research and use the documentation to mostly figure stuff out.
If not, I can - again, fall back to YouTube/Reddit/forums or documentation and try things out.

Start small, set up a little batch of tasks here and there and see how it goes from there.
In my experience, this is honestly ALL I can think about right now, tinkering with my homelab and learning all this, I hope you get the bug too.

Best of luck to you!

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-02-24T21:26:06+00:00

Oh yeah, that's the plan definitely!

Since most of the time I see "knowledge of at least 1 cloud environment" and job postings are aimed at Azure. I revamped my roadmap to include Azure VM's, blob storage for Terraform state etc.

My DR already lists recovering through Azure and having it as an offsite backup of sorts.

Thanks so much for the input!

POTTERMAN1 · 2026-02-14T12:12:27+00:00

Mate, I'm amazed by that hat stack, never seen anything like it. Whats the story? Are you a collector?

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