Azhar Mahmood

I run a 5-node Kubernetes cluster in my basement. This single line in your resume will make you stand out from 99% of candidates. "Hands-on experience emerged as the most valued factor at 95% importance" - LF Talent Report 2025 Companies need skills, not degrees. They will hire proof: Repos, pipelines, on-call stories. Not degrees. Your action plan: Build a homelab. Start with a laptop. Install Linux on it. When you're able to install Arch Linux without using the install script, you are ready to move on to containers. There are plenty of high-quality and free Docker tutorials out there. Use them. Create a project that involves running multiple containers. - Postgres database - FastAPI backend - Flask frontend Build the images with GitHub Actions. Then build a Kubernetes homelab. This is the single most effective thing you can do to land DevOps jobs. Comment HOMELAB if you want to learn how to build one!