Back to School - Self Hosted Edition

I only wish I had the option to use Docker when I was in college 18 years ago. Docker enables us to spin up apps with no knowledge of coding. In fact, you don't even have to think about the coding behind the app. Just install and use it.

We understand there are some software and applications you are forced to use when it comes to college and school in general. This list will go over some apps you can use to host your own data for complete control.

Scheduling and Project Management

Vikunja - Vikunja is an amazing app for managing projects and simple todo tasks. It can be a great asset to keep you organized and let you know when papers, projects and assignments are due. You can see our Vikunja review here!

Note Taking and Documentation

Bookstack - Bookstack is a wiki/knowledge base application and is a fantastic option for students who have a difficult time remembering things or even for those who are hardcore note takers and want to keep detailed notes on everything they learn in classes. Bookstack makes it easy to print your notes or save them as a PDF if you need to do that.

Document Serving

Paperless-NGX -  Keeping important student documents is something I only wish I was better at when I was in college. Now is your chance to do what I didn't and save all those documents by scanning them! You can serve them up with Paperless-NGX and even search the documents using OCR technology! While we receive most of those in emails as digital attachments, most schools and universities are still sending important documents using snail mail.

File Management

Nextcloud - Nextcloud is way more than a file manager. It has become a complete suite of powerful applications and quite frankly covers most of the options above that I already mentioned. I was never a huge fan of Nextcloud for photos but when it comes to school and document creation, it's very powerful. Nextcloud has many options to boost productivity such as LibreOffice which is a suite includes spreadsheets, docs and much more. You can share documents with family and friends. I see this being a huge asset to a student who wants to self host their own data.

Contacts and Mood Tracking

Monica - Simply put, Monica empowers people who want to be better. Perhaps you want to keep track of your professors, colleagues and friends you make while in college. Monica is a wonderful solution to help you do that and track your mood while you venture through school or university.

Getting Good Sleep

Noisedash - It's important to get good sleep and unwind after long days of putting your brain through the ringer. Some students sit through up to 8 classes a day! That is a lot to absorb in one day and can be very exhausting. This can also cause the brain to overload making it hard to sleep at night. Noisedash can help calm the brain by using ambient noises you can listen to while you dose off and self host yourself!

Final Notes and Thoughts

Like I said earlier, I wish I had options like this when I was in college! There are so many incredible apps at your disposal to help you become more organized. The best part is most of them are open source and all of them are free! Take advantage of what's available and let us know what other apps you enjoy using for school.