To give you an idea of how far I've been gone from the process, the most complete A-Z process I've done for deploying involves installing a LAMP stack, select and configure PHP and Apache modules, and pointing nameservers to load a given web page URI.
It's probably not done anything like that anymore so I am not sure where to begin. What is the most "for dummies" hand-holding guides you can think of for modern deployment setups? I'm struggling because this is where I am having to self-guide more than "learn Python in 12 weeks" kind of stuff and I don't know if that learn in a few weeks example can be applied to deployment so cleanly.
Full disclosure, I don't have a job where I can do this or seek guidance from. I am unemployed and without a personal guide.
Just go to https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted and pick some apps you like.
Then follow their deployment guide to deploy.
Of course, you should make some of these services public and invite people to use them. Once your services start crashing, you can learn how to optimize and scale.
Also, give it time and avoid being a "2 minute man". This whole "learn in 12 weeks" crap needs to stop. I've never seen a doctor or lawyer who wanted to become a practitioner in 3 months so why should hard stuff like devops or programming be any different?