Self-study and home lab work, labelled as such because it has never been a network engineering role and there is no certification and no production configuration behind it.
- Built many PCs from scratch for myself, family and friends, matching the specification to what the person actually needed and the case and fans to what they wanted it to look like.
- Experimented across macOS, Windows and Linux rather than settling into one.
- Recently started home-labbing properly and standing up a local personal server.
The networking, stated honestly
Layer 2 and Layer 3, covering VLANs and 802.1Q trunking, switching, MAC and ARP, STP and RSTP, link aggregation, IP addressing, subnetting and CIDR, static routing, OSPF concepts, NAT and PAT, ACLs, zone segmentation and TCP and UDP traffic analysis.
All of that is self-study and home lab work. What it honestly buys me is that infrastructure conversations do not stop at the application boundary. Stated that way it is initiative. Stated as a headline capability it would invite a question I cannot answer with a project, so I do not state it that way.
DNS is the exception and carries full weight, having been applied professionally at Prospa to support large-scale partner integration.
Taken together with the fifteen years of building and fixing things, this is a long run of self-directed practice rather than a recent interest.