Weekly Wins: Home Lab and Career Growth

This week brought some solid progress on both the technical and career fronts. Here's what I accomplished, and what I learned doing it.

Better Infrastructure

The biggest quality-of-life fix was finally adding a network switch and moving the home lab server off Wi-Fi onto Ethernet. The difference was immediate: file transfers stopped stuttering, SSH sessions stopped dropping, and the containers that pull data over the network became noticeably more responsive. Wireless was always the weakest link in the lab, and I had been working around it instead of fixing it.

The bigger project was storage. The server's original drive was filling up, with Docker responsible for most of the growth, so I added a new hard drive to the Ubuntu Server box and did the whole setup from the command line: identifying the disk with lsblk, partitioning it, formatting the new partition, and adding it to /etc/fstab by UUID so it mounts reliably on every boot. Before this week, disk management on Linux was something I had only read about - now it's something I've actually done.

With the new drive mounted, I migrated my Docker containers onto the new storage without any downtime. I moved stack by stack, verified each set of containers came back healthy before touching the next, and confirmed nothing was still writing to the old location before cleaning it up. That careful, one-stack-at-a-time approach is the same habit that later grew into the full reorganization I wrote about in How I Organized 31 Docker Containers.

Career Growth

The lab work fed directly into the career work. I updated my resume with the skills this project actually exercised - Linux disk management, Docker administration, and network troubleshooting - with concrete outcomes instead of a list of tool names. I also wrote a tailored cover letter for the next IT role I'm targeting, and started learning PowerShell so my scripting isn't limited to the Linux side of the house. Coming from bash, the verb-noun cmdlet pattern and Get-Help made the first steps easier than I expected.

What's the Takeaway?

None of these wins were big on their own, but they compound. A stable network makes the server dependable, dependable storage makes Docker experiments safe, and every one of those experiments turns into a line on the resume that I can back up with a story in an interview.