100% building a home lab and being able to talk about it openly, from memory, in your own words, from experience, is invaluable for interviews.
I might update this. I might not. I have a lot to say but In out drinking.
All I will say now is save this list. You'll look back at it in 5 years and wonder what half of those things are.
...
Okay a bit more from the bar:
If you want dev sec ops, grafana, elk, build dashboards, get your agents setup in your fleet, get it all secure locally. That alone will impress any interviewer who knows anything.
Dev ops specifically? Focus on building a local GitLab instance. Use grafana to monitor it. Run some app that has a busy db. Grafana dashboards on that. Oh my goodness, what a HOG you are GitLab! Tune it for your env. Purposely misconfigure something to watch, idk, the RAM keep growing because you didn't setup redis or some shit.
The sea is vast. You're hungry. Employers will see that once you land interviews.
If you want a ton of dev sec ops ideas, I am a good sounding board. Regular dev ops isn't my daily grind so I know a bit less. What I do know is if you're not ready to rebuild a multi node cluster some night after hours, you're not quite a boss (doesn't mean you're not ready). So, emulate that nightmare.
Back to drinking 🍻
Edit: double check your *arr ideas bc afaik most of those were abandoned after a few major vulns were uncovered. That was months ago so that may be old hat.
Holy fucking pretentious douche, batman! Catch my block list.