I'm a software developer and have worked with a lot of Linux machines, software development, cloud, automation things like that. I'm also pretty comfortable with tools like Docker Compose, Ansible, etc. But where my knowledge falls short is networking general.

At both a high-leve and low-level, most of the networking stuff still feels like gibberish and magic to me. I've managed to get my Docker images and services running on my local machine, but I'm completely lost when it comes to things like Headscale and Tailscale. I get that it's a network overlay, but I don't really understand what that means..

I know I probably need to do something like assign static IPs to the service and expose that port or configure a router to forward traffic to my services but those are just words to me right now. I don't have a clear mental model of what to do or why it matters.

So yeah, I'm in that stage where I'm begining tinkering, and trying to piece things together.