If you work in IT, you should own a domain. Possibly two.
The first one is your professional presence. If you’re lucky enough to have an unusual name, or smart enough to grab it early,you get something like craigcorbin.com. That’s your home on the internet. It gives you a place to write posts like this one. But more importantly, it gives you a sandbox to learn real concepts: DNS, MX records, DKIM, CNAMEs, A records. The stuff that matters at work.
It lets you develop skills for the job you have, or the job you want.
It also lets you make mistakes and learn by fixing them without bringing down a corporate network. That part is underrated.
These aren’t expensive. Ten, maybe twelve dollars a year for a domain. If you use something like Cloudflare, you get the added benefit of an easy tunnel to a home machine, a secure way to put something on the internet without exposing your whole network. You still have to make sure the machine is secure, but the barrier to entry is basically nothing.
I think this goes back to a core philosophy: IT folks should be naturally curious. And it doesn’t take a lot of money to be curious. You can take the laptop you’re using right now, buy a domain, run WordPress on it, point it through a tunnel, and, voila,you have a site hosted inside your house.
Just like this one.
Quick aside on the second domain: one is your personal home on the internet. The other one is your toy. If you want to go down the white hat hacking path because that interests you, knock yourself out. The lessons learned can live on your professional site. But the playground itself shouldn’t be public-facing.
That’s my two cents for tonight. Catch you on the next one.