Learning is fun.
Learning is stressful.
Learning is exciting.
Learning is all of the above and more.
The Drive
I spent many years doing other things for work - working as a Corrections Officer, driving and owning semi trucks, working as a mechanic and now in the IT space. One thing has remained the same - I strive to understand all the things that relate to whatever it is I am doing. All the inner workings and oddities that make things tick. In some ways, I've always been an engineer at heart.
I find great enjoyment out of closing the rest of the world out and just using trial and error until I get the end result I want.
Learning related to IT
What makes me happy about where I am today is that I won't ever learn it all. I will always have something new and exciting to learn. When I got into IT, I always found myself thinking "There has to be an easier way to do this". However, at the time, I was working for a company as an external tier 1 support agent. You are not given many opportunities to actually help drive innovation in a position like that.
So I started teaching myself some powershell that I could use instead of having to click through the AD Users and Computers GUI. Simple things like get-aduser john.doe or Unlock-AdAccount john.doe, just to change it up. Searching and scrolling in ADUC got old quicky.
From there I wanted to learn more. How can you learn more without breaking a customer's production environment or when you have no other means to learn in the office environment? Two words: Homelab
Homelabbing
Oh boy the things we could go into here, and the things that you see on Reddit regarding this topic. From old laptops in a cluster to SFF workstations to something that outgrows r/homelab and goes right to r/HomeDataCenter.
I went the route, originally, of buying used enterprise servers and repurposing them at home for things like Proxmox, linux, Windows Server Hyper-V, Unraid. You name it, I probably tried it for a few moments or thought about it for a bit. This has gone one for years for me and I have the 42u rack to show for it. Do I recommend that you go this route? Only if you have access to free electricity and cooling. Regardless of the route you choose - homelabbing is the hobby that allows you to grow and learn and do ALL of the things you've ever wished you could do in production. I like to term it the "what does this button do" intrusive thought.
This is the piece that allowed me to experiment with Active Directory. I was able to start experimenting with looped calls and lists of users and all the fun things you can do writ large. That led to other experiments and learning.
Swapping roles on a whim
I got into IAM on a whim. I had seen a posting at work for it on our careers page. It sounded really cool and I was thinking that man MAYBE I can go own the thing I am messing around with at work. Then that led to another learning tangent - Okta. I am still actually quite shocked I got the role back then. However, its led me on this exciting, frustrating, sometimes curse filled trip that has been the last 5 or so years of my life. The best part of it is this: I will never stop learning.