if you could start again in your self hosting journey, what would you do differently? :)

That’s an excellent question.

If I were to start over, the first thing that I would do is start by learning the basics of networking and set up a VPN! IMO exposing services to the public internet should be considered more of an advanced level task. When you don’t know what you don’t know, it’s risky and frankly unnecessary.

The lowest barrier to entry for a personal VPN, by far, is Tailscale. Automatic internal DNS and clients for nearly any device makes finding services on a dedicated machine really, really, easy. Look into putting a tailscale client right into the compose file so you automatically get an internal DNS records for a service rather than a whole machine.

From there, play around with more ownership (work) with regard to what can touch your network. Switch from Tailscale’s “trusted” login to hosting your own Headscale instance. Add a PiHole or AdGuard exit node and set up your own internal DNS records.

Maybe even scrap the magic (someone else’s logic that may or may not be doing things you need) and go for a plain-Jane Wireguard setup.

Another +1 from me. Very similar setup and it’s been working for me for years.

OpenScale works great and kind of does what you want. If you have an old Android phone laying around you can have it persistently connected to a cheap Bluetooth scale. Functional, but at a much have higher power cost than an ESP32 solution. Automated database exports to a local file (on the android device) and Syncthing can move your data around for analysis.

The good folks over at Gadgetbridge might have a solution too, although their list of supported scales looks pretty short.

You might also look into making a project like rmfakecloud to trick your Fitbit device into pushing data to a local server.

Not sure about home assistant though, I’ve never used it.