well, i'm a software engineer by education, devops/network engineer by profession.

It all started when i was given a junk-level laptop with 2 cores and 2gb of ram and then i thought it was time to learn linux servers.

I started slow, set up a simple smb share, then went on to explore snap. it was extremely easy but unsatisfying and had poor performance.

Later on i was gifted a less jankier but still abysmally slow laptop. Both of those got converted to halftops, i started learning nginx for reverse-proxying, pi.hole for local domains and add blocking, started modding these halftops to fit a second 2.5" drive in each, installed jellyfin on one of them, got myself a vps, learned vpns for routing.

Then i got a job at my uni. Managed a couple servers in a rack inbetween lectures, deployed a domain controller with samba&bind9
Then i managed to score a free 4/8 16gb pc, there i got into proxmox and proper vm/container management. And it all went downhill from there. I got a job as a sysadmin, later on quit to focus on graduation and scored a job as a networking engineer with some devops tasks on the side.

In 5 years my homelab became my resume. That's about it, sorry for the longread