Homelab setups that got you hired - show and tell

Tom · Sysadmin, healthcare · 19 June 2026 illustrative example

Reading the warehouse-to-cloud story got me thinking. For those of us who route around the paper-qualifications door, the homelab IS the CV.

What's in yours, and has it ever directly landed you work? Bonus points for the jankiest thing that's ever been load-bearing.

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4 replies

Dan · Junior network tech · 20 June 2026 illustrative example
Three-node Proxmox cluster on ex-office minis, pfSense, VLANs done properly, Prometheus + Grafana because I wanted pretty graphs and accidentally learned observability.
Brought screenshots to my apprenticeship interview on my phone. The interviewer spent 20 minutes asking about my VLAN layout and 0 minutes about my GCSEs. Hired.
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- Tom · Sysadmin, healthcare · 20 June 2026 illustrative example
  'Accidentally learned observability chasing pretty graphs' is the most ADHD-friendly onramp into monitoring there is. It's how I learned too.
Sam · Infrastructure consultant · 21 June 2026 illustrative example
Confession: my lab is deliberately boring now. Two mini PCs, everything in compose files, documented like a client site. The discipline of writing it up IS the practice - my dyspraxia means my hands-on speed is average, so my documentation being excellent is the differentiator.
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Richard · Senior infrastructure engineer · 21 June 2026 illustrative example
Jankiest load-bearing thing: for a year my DNS ran on a Raspberry Pi held to the rack by the world's oldest velcro strap. It had better uptime than the NAS.
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