Competitions. In college I did the ACM ICPC and trained hard with my schools programming team.

These days I do advent of code, which will start on Dec 1. But you can go fo previous years now. It is great.

That is actually pretty solid. Ordered one.

Expensive is a little bit a problem. Mostly I don’t want to spend money.

I’m going to try a Zimaboard for the backup server. It should be fine. I might need a USB hub but whatever, performance isn’t a wiggle there.

I’m not allowed to go places or do things. That isn’t a bad idea though.

Absolutely. I use ipv6 so I can directly reach all my servers. For public facing things I put it on an ipv4 address but for my own internal stuff, ipv6.