It's nice to see a home lab on HN. Hardware has become a lost art for many.
If you dont have a home lab, start one. Grab a 1l pc off of ebay. Think center m720q or m920q with an i5 is a great place to start. It will cost you less than 200 bucks and if you want to turn it into a NAS or an Opnsense box later you can.
When it arrives toss Proxmox on it and get your toys from the community scripts section... it will let you get set up on 'easy mode'. Fair warning, having a home lab is an addiction, and will change how you look at development if you get into it deeply.
I credit homelabbing through my twenties with just about everything good that's happened to me in my career. I certainly didn't end up being moderately employable because I'm smart, charismatic, incisive, creative, lucky, educated, diligent, connected, handsome, sanitary, interesting, or thoughtful; no, it's because I have a tendency toward obsession, delusions of grandeur, and absolutely terrible impulse control.
So I started buying junk on eBay and trying to connect it together and make it do things, and the more frustrated I got, the less able I was to think about literally anything else, and I'd spend all night poking around on Sourceforge or random phpBBs trying to get the damn things to compile or communicate or tftp boot or whatever I wanted them to do.
The only problem was eventually I got good enough that I actually _could_ keep the thing running and my wife and kid and I started putting good stuff on my computers, like movies and TV shows and music and pictures and it started to actually be a big deal when I blew something up. Like, it wasn't just that I felt like a failure, but that I felt like a failure AND my kid couldn't watch Avatar and that's literally all he wanted to watch.
So now I have two homelabs, one that keeps my family happy and one that's basically the Cato to my Clouseau, a sort of infrastructural nemesis that will just actually try to kill me. Y'know, for fulfillment.
Not sure if it happens to most, but I have looped back around to not wanting to play sysadmin at home. Most of the stuff I have running I haven't updated in a awhile, luckily since I own it and it's all internal I don't need to worry about anyone taking away my locally hosted apps. Thank the IT gods for docker compose, and tools like portainer to minimize the amount of fuddling around I have to do.
That, and I've learned the stuff I need to from my homelab. Earlier in my career, setting up a light version of a production network at home was hugely educational and I think it was a large part of why I'm a senior today. But now, I don't need to run all that at home unless I have specific learning objectives. So I keep my home network a lot simpler than it used to be, as a result.
Same, replaced the ISP router with my own and have a single box which has storage and compute for running VMs and NFS and that is it. Last thing I want to be doing on a Friday night is debugging why my home network is broken.
If you dont have a home lab, start one. Grab a 1l pc off of ebay. Think center m720q or m920q with an i5 is a great place to start. It will cost you less than 200 bucks and if you want to turn it into a NAS or an Opnsense box later you can.
When it arrives toss Proxmox on it and get your toys from the community scripts section... it will let you get set up on 'easy mode'. Fair warning, having a home lab is an addiction, and will change how you look at development if you get into it deeply.