I learned Oracle by setting up bunches of Oracle VMs, doing horrible things to them, getting rid of the bodies, and starting over. Their sacrifices have helped me be a competent entry-level Oracle DBA. I’m learning Python on a VM configured with Eclipse and another VM with Jupyter. I’m actually a SQL Server DBA, and we don’t have much of a SQL Server test environment where I work. I test what I can in VMs in my homelab. Flashed a consumer router with OpenWRT and learned tons about networking, and confirmed why I never aspired to be a network engineer LOL. Trying to access my homelab remotely taught me a lot more about information security. Wanting to know what’s going on with my infrastructure (InfluxDB+prometheus+Grafana) has given me greater insight into SRE.