I'd be interested to know what you run on your home lab thats assisting with your professional life :)

Two quick examples that I can think from the recent past - I work in a fairly tech conservative IT environment for mid-size industrial company. We're slow to adopt lot of industry trends. So when containers became popular in the mid-2010s, we pretty much stayed away until around 2020-2021. I've been running containers in my home lab for years and had a very grasp of building and deploying containers. So I was able to drive that change and also pass on that self-gained knowledge to many on team that were to new to the concept.

Another example - for years we were mostly a Oracle shop. With some SQL Server thrown in. But management wanted us to trim our annual licensing cost. So we switched a lot of our in-house applications to Postgres. I was using Postgres for years at home and had gained a lot of experience with it. So again, it was an area I was able to contribute a lot when transitioning away Oracle and Sql server.

On the flip side there are things I learned at work, that I was able to bring home and apply to my home lab. One being Ansible and other being network segmentation. Specifically around using VLANs and access control

Very cool. Thanks for sharing.

Couldn't agree more! It's been a very fun hobby