I love my Vita, and have been considering doing this for a while. Biggest reason being that I couldn't really do much with the 4GB memory card it came with - and you can't just replace it with an SD card unless you hack it (and get a SD card-to-cartridge adaptor. Luckily they're really cheap). I was worried it'd mess up my PSN account, but after some reading, I found out you can still use all PSN features as normal, which was a relief.
The process was fairly simple - faster and I'd even say easier than modding a 3DS. The apps popping up and closing suddenly did give me a bit of a scare, but everything went really fast and smooth!
I used the official guide, by the way: https://vita.hacks.guide/
Now... what?
Now I'm mainly waiting for my SD card adapter to arrive, once it comes... A whole world of possibilities will open, hehe!
Once it comes, I'm going to grab a bunch of emulators - maybe I'll use RetroArch for them, I've never used RetroArch anywhere before... And going to try to figure out Adrenaline (it's a PSP emulator, I think?). Last time I tried to use it it throwed a bunch of errors - maybe it needs more storage space (my memory card has less than 40MB of free space now, lol)
I'm also excited about the possibility to install my carts onto the system, so that I don't need to swap them out. While I love handling cartridges, my Vita case doesn't have any pockets or anything where I could put them, which means I can't really carry them around with me.
During the wait so far I've been playing some of the physical games I own: Tearaway and Lumines: Electronic Symphony. I love both of them so much. Lumines I'm already acquainted with, while Tearaway I started playing today.
Lumines: Electronic Symphony is just gorgeous. Seriously, go look at gameplay of it on Youtube or something. The way it feels to play this game... just amazing. While I'm a huge fan of the original game, I love this one even more.
And, as for Tearaway... I've wanted to play it since it was first announced, but only just today I finally got around to it. It's such an adorable game, man!!! I think once I get further in the game I'll make a decicated post about it. I want to talk about it so bad. It definitely deserves the praise it seems to have been getting. I must try making some of the papercraft models I've unlocked...
Well, back to the topic of modding and homebrew - was surprised the community around Vita homebrew is still very active! The community has made a whole lot of awesome ports, original games, tools... I need to check them all out!! A cool compilation/list of homebrew stuff: Awesome PlayStation Vita
A thing that's also new to me is that some people in the community offer bounties for certain pieces of homebrew - like specific hardware tools and Android game ports, for example. That's a cool way to motivate homebrew devs to keep the console "alive"!
Very excited to dive in on all the stuff I've been missing on my stock firmware PS Vita! 8D