@djwopasadjlk, I don't consider myself much more than a newb either! LOL
Unfortunately, no, I do not have a blog. On the plus side, there are countless blogs out there to cover all of what I've done and more!
For my pfSense setup, nguvu and Lawrence Systems taught me a lot! You can find a good baseline guide here!
LinuxBabe.com is an excellent source for information. This guide paved the way to self-host an email server and get around a dynamic IP and all the restrictions associated with it.
Don't be afraid to play around. I've broken a lot more than I've fixed/got running! If you can, pick up a used server. You can find them for pennies on the dollar. Typically, if you swap in some new hard drives, you'll get several solid years out of them, depending on how old they are. Turn it into a virtual host (VMware/Proxmox VE/KVM/Zen/etc.). Snapshots are your friend!!!
Oh, and for the record, I was able to get everything working. Now, instead of using HAProxy in pfSense and routing traffic through CloudFlare to my residential dynamic IP, all internet traffic comes through my public VPS with HAproxy and WireGuard, back to each local VM. The trick to making everything reachable was found in PolicyRouting.
I hope this helps you on your journey!