I've come to recognize my view that "anyone could install this web server" is a view most commonly shared among fellow techies, and not one shared by the greater population.

Yeah. Of course not 'everyone' will be able to, and maybe that's what we should be considering the 'lay person' now...

But there is a wide range of knowledge in this space. A 'lay person' is kind of hard to get down to a spot without potentially lumping people together improperly.

Take my customer for example. She's not stupid. She knows she could probably fix the computer I am fixing for her, herself. But she also knows there are things she just doesn't know and probably should get someone else who does know those things to do it instead. Is she the lay person? From talking to her, I am pretty sure with a couple quick hours of reading some stuff, she could probably set up a basic Nginx server or something very easily for herself. Etc, etc. Yet, by others standards, she is a lay person because she can't utilize Apache or AWS.

So, yeah... that's my take on it.

I totally started there, knowing a lot of stuff was in my reach but would take some reading to succeed with. It's still hard for me to anticipate who will persist and who will throw their hands up and declare they aren't technical.

Yeah, you could say I am even still 'there' to some degree. Sure, I fix computers for people, but that's kinda easy. I know enough to know when to not do something, essentially. And that can be hellishly important as a skill.

But the fact remains that I have a A+ book from Comptia left unread that I found at a 2nd hand store, a book on Bash that I found at a bar also unread, and a book on Python from O'reily via Amazon; yes, unread. All of them unread.

Why? I dunno. Can't be damned to? I taught myself pretty much everything I know through trial and error. If I want something in a program to do something else, I alter the code and reverse engineer it until it does what I want. This is how I make mods for games usually, when I tinker at all. How do I know what to tinker with? I read, ironically. Yeah, I know. Go figure, right?

But still, those books lay unread in a desk next to me as I type this.

So what am I reading? Well, it's quite simple. If I ever get to a point where my own intuition or knowledge isn't good enough, and I don't see the answer staring me in the face via some comments in the code, or some error code thing, etc, etc...

I google it.