Im a little "seasoned" at 45 rotations around the blue ball so YRMV lol
1 - Pirated Movies - XBMC -> Plex (2 bare metal servers with transition to Virtual in progress)
2 - Storage - Freenas -> Synology (300+TB across 6 units)
3 - Networking - Unmanaged -> Managed / Multi Vendor / LACP / WIFI
4 - Compute - ION Based NUC -> ThinCentre / ML360G6
5 - Virtual Envio - Single ESXI Host -> 5 Node Proxmox Cluster with Ceph on 10G
Basically for me it started with Saving private ryan on VCD / CDR back in the day, that led me down the IRC rabbit hole and i got into XBMC for playback. That meant NAS storage for more movies and then from XBMC i moved into Plex so needed more server based compute and such. All the while needed to learn networking to hook it all up and make it work correctly.
I also went from working at Terminix as a pest control operator to doing customer support via email for a .com in the early 2000's to now leading technical deployments at a forture 10 pharma :)
All cause of Saving Private Ryan on Pirated VCD in CAMMED quality lol
3 UPS's read 350ish Watt all day 24/7/365 and thats just from my main rack
Add another 400 watts for my proxmox cluster (5 node one being an ML360g6 for 200watts)
And then another 150ish watts for my computer desk with 2 laptops and 6 monitors
Did i say i live in an apt and DONT pay for electric :)