I’ve spun up Gitea in my homelab as well as at work and don’t recall being difficult so perhaps they fixed whatever was causing your issue

Yep, was going to say that refactoring my own code taught me a lot

In 11-12th grades I played a lot of card tournaments (mostly Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh) eventually ending up as the one running the competitions for our local groups and learned HTML so I could maintain a simple site with rankings etc. This led to people asking me for tech favors fixing random stuff and eventually into various web projects where I got into CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL, etc.

Building automation to play SpaceTraders as well as tools to aid in board game design