Not sure if it's intentional, but it looks like your sign up and submit application form got mixed up. The application requires a work email or specifically a not gmail-domain-email to apply.

Great tutorial. More importantly though, how did you get that desktop wallpaper?

Ha, my favorite question. The video is from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skI8e5BCozE.

You can use Dreamscene for Windows 7/8. On Windows 10, I used VideoPaper, a free tool from https://www.reddit.com/r/VideoPaper/. It hasn't been updated in a while, so it might not work anymore. Apparently, you can also use VLC to set a video as your desktop background.

I'm the same way. I usually think "why is this even news, it's not like these people were friends of this person." Then at times like these, I'm reminded what an impact his work had on my life.

Looks like something is wrong with you SSL cert... "No client certificate CA names sent", is it supposed to be self-signed?

This is probably a very dumb question, but what exactly do you mean when you say you run bare metal servers at a data center?

I run a kind of similar setup sans Visual Studio, so I'm very interested in understanding your setup a little better.

Bare metal means I'm not running on VMs, but on dedicated servers, like the ones you can find on OVH and many others.