You go to an eye doctor, they do the various tests and create a prescription with the necessary details to get you the right glasses. For the next year, you can use that prescription to buy glasses anywhere you want.

Any code reviewer will tell you code review is harder than writing code. And it gets harder and harder the lower the quality the code is; the more revisions and research the code reviewer needs to do to get the final product to a high quality.

One must consider how humans will interact with this part of the program (often this throws all kinds of spanners in the works), what happens when data comes in differently than expected, how other parts of the system work with this one, etc, etc, etc. Code that merely achieves the stated goals of a ticket can easily produce a dozen tickets later if not done right.

For the money angle, something like a Digital Ocean droplet would be appropriate here. They are $4/mo and you don’t even need to run the thing all the time, just when you need an app version approved.

You don’t need to give them a premier experience, you aren’t trying to sell them on the features of your app. It just needs to function.

Load in those 20 royalty free songs and let the algorithm suck at picking the next of the 20.

Yes, iOS app approval is a pain in the ass (this is one of the reasons there is so much fuss about app store policies and anti-competitive practices). They do test the app and if it has to connect to a server, they will ask you to provide such for them to test against.

Setup a virtual host that you only turn on when they need to approve a new version. Give it some royalty free music to serve.

We need other ways to discover shit on the internet.

https://duckduckgo.com/

For DIY, just about any setup would work fine as long as you put it in a case with lots of bays. Throw 2 or 3 of these in there* and you now have however many ports are on the motherboard (probably 2 or 4) plus 8-12 more ports available via the cards.

*I’m not recommending that specific card, just something that gives you SATA ports on a PCI-E card. Just pay attention to bandwidth bottlenecks on the cards. Here is a table of PCI-E speeds.

Since you are looking to build up to 12 bays, what you can do is buy that 4x 12TB drive set now, transfer everything over to the new system, then add the old 12TB drives into the array one-by-one expanding it to an 8x 12TB array. This ensures no data loss, nor wasted drives.

Edit: Also with 8 drives, consider using RAID 6 instead of RAID 5. It’s almost the same thing, it just has two redundancy drives instead of one. Depending on how full your current RAID is, you may or may not need to start the new array with 5x 12TB drives instead of 4 due to the lower capacity when using RAID 6.