Grats on the win!!

Good for you!!

This is the beginning of something great. The time and place where one starts to realize that passion is the true treasure in the sea of hedonism, consumerism, infantilism.

I got my first and only job in the same way as you did, 13 years ago, and I still am and forever will be better than most of my colleagues that just “do their work”.

It’s not “love what you do”, it’s “do what you love”.

My congratulations to you, fellow selfhoster.

I’ve been in this business for ~15 years… Currently Staff level SRE making a very comfortable living. I have no degree. No certs. No professional training of any kind. I got into it because I setup my first Linux box as a teenager in the late 90s and have never been without one ever since.

The lack of credentials really doesn’t affect me at all.

That being said though, I don’t know that I could recommend that path to very many people any more. It’s definitely possible but the world has gotten so much more complicated from when I was coming up. It’s a lot harder if a way in but for the right person it’s great.

One of my coworkers always tells people “Just start with a Plex/media server” and it grows from there. It’s worked for at least four of us who work on our team and I’d say we’re all doing some cool things now. Good luck friend! Keep labbing

Anyone who has a home lab would be top of my list. It seems normal while being on this sub, but I hardly come across anyone who has one and the skills required to maintain one definite shows in an interview.

Congrats! Absolutely worth posting you silly goose. They’ll appreciate your self starter can do attitude. I personally would put someone with a personal projects solely to sharpen their skills at the top of my list.

That’s how I got my first job for sure.

Congrats. Welcome to the IT arena.

Congratulations nice! I run a homelab server too running about 15 services, apps and sites I programmed/designed, and free software like Plex! I just enjoy it, I also have AI pipelines for like stable diffusion and rvc ,

I think the hard part of home lab is scaling and designing/organizing your files and infrastructure. I literally have a monorepo with submodules of projects all of which are connected meticulously using containerization like docker, pods, etc . I’m able to bring up websites quickly like to the Internet in production as well. it’s crazy. I used to pay for a VPS, and use control panel, etc, waste of money xD

homelab is great, but time consuming and learning curve

this is barely worthy of a post

I strongly disagree. This is really awesome and I’m pretty sure a lot of us would not mind getting a job because we dabble in servers as a hobby. Congratulations!!

Companies love someone who spends their free time learning skills that benefit them.

I’ve always made sure to mention my personal interest and the last few years my full-server rack at least a short summary.

It’s gotten my foot in the door quite often when talking to managers with some IT knowledge; ones that don’t have any I wouldn’t want to work with anyways.

Good luck at your new job OP!
And don’t listen to the disgruntled old-timers that say you’ll stop exploring in your free time, they’re just jealous and/or have kids with very little free time left.

Hey man it’s how I got into my position where I’m at now, all self taught. I started just as help desks, then the place I worked for had an opening and a Lab technology specialist, which I knew nothing about anything in that field. But in the interview talking about all my home lab projects and goals and just general love for tech. Next thing I knew a week later got a nice pay bump with a promise in a way bigger one if I make it a year. Well now I design PCB and work of very custom hardware and software and it’s all still mine blowing to me.

Basically same for me. Didn’t do this stuff in my last job (95% of the time) I’m doing now and speaking about my homelab really helped sell my interest and learning abilities in the job interview.

Which company use Proxmox? Bring me too. All I give job application they say VMWare and never heard of Proxmox