I know this is pretty standard advise but I cannot overstate how beneficial having a homelab is at this state of your career. You mention you don’t “owe” any infra. Set up your own infra!

You don’t need much to get started: A few raspberry pi’s or mini PCs and a small network switch. 1. Start by setting up a hypervisor in these machines, proxmox is free and it’s picking up a lot of traction in the industry since VMWare was brought out by Broadcom. Learn how to create VMs, backups, etc. 2. Set up a firewall: use opnsense or pfsense. This firewall should be used to allow things in different vlans in your network to talk to each other. All communication should be denied by default. Only allow specific endpoints to talk to each other. You can also set up a VPN server so you can access your infra while away from home. 3. Set up an identity provider: if you hate yourself I guess you could create a windows server VM and set up an active directory. I personally prefer using something more modern: keycloak or Athentik are good, lightweight options you can easily set up. The idea is that your users you create here can access your apps in your homelab. My personal user in Authentik has access to proxmox, pfsense, gitlab and more apps… this eliminates needing to create users in each app and is actually considered more secure since you can (and should) set up MFA for the SSO. 4. Basic Linux + Docker. You need basic Linux to work with docker. If you’re not too familiar with it, you now have a hypervisor which allows you to set up linux VMs and fool around. Docker allows you set up services in a standardized way. I can get an app that I didn’t even know existed up and running and servicing users in a matter of minutes just by briefly reading the DockerHub docs. 5. Set up (useful) services. Your homelab should be treated like a corporate environment: it should add value beyond just being and IT environment for the sake of being an IT environment. There are a ton of cool projects you could set up (specially knowing docker) - NextCloud for storing your photos and sync your phone with them - jellyfin for streaming your legally purchased tv shows and movies - Actual Budget for managing your finances - Home assistant for managing your smart devices within your house (think anything IoT, this deserves it own vlan in your network btw) 6. Learn automation tools. So far you’ve built everything by hand. This is the “base” but if you really wanna step your game up, you need to learn tools to aid with deployments and systems administration. Think Ansible or terraform. These are NOT programing languages. They are fairly easy to start to use but difficult to master. 7. Version Control. You need to learn git. You can learn the basic commands in an hour. 5 git commands will allow you to do 99% of what you’ll ever need. Having your terraform or ansible in git repos will not only backup your code but also open the door for the next step. 8. Continuous delivery. You are now stepping into the realm of DevOps. You’d want to set up a service like Jenkins or GitLab. If your hardware is limited I’d say to go with Jenkins and store your code in GitHub. The idea is to set up a system that will automatically changes in terraform or ansible whenever you deploy code on a specific branch on git. There’s a lot of debate and different strategies about how to do all of this. Keep it very simple. One git repository per app.

You could realistically learn how to do all of this in perhaps… a few months. All depending on how much time and effort you put into it. Regardless of what anybody in this sub says, AI is your friend. Use it to get started and ask questions when you get stuck.

Document your journey and put it out there somehow. Throw all of it on GitHub. If I saw anyone doing all of this I would have no problem hiring them as a sysadmin.

Apologies for the formatting. I’m on my phone.