A job for the boring, a hobby for the deranged: systems administration. Do you like spending 4 hours digging through documentation, trawling through logs, and desperately searching for a solution to a problem only to find out it was typo in a configuration file? How about spending hours of your life, away from work, learning how poorly designed software works and attempting to get it running? Perhaps you want to deal with dipshit software developers that push half baked code that breaks your shit? If you answered yes, then sysadmin is for you!

Something to keep in mind is that sysadmins are like the offensive line in American football. No one notices them unless they fuckup. No one will be grateful for any work, and they will forget that there's a human maintaining the services they use. You should only do this for the love of it, or you will burn out; or worse, be shit at your job.

Get linux machine, whether through a VPS (I like digital ocean and capsul) or a spare machine, and throw some software on it. It's the best way to learn. Start with a personal site. If you don't have your own domain you're a digital peasant. Owning and maintaining your own shit is a moral good, and you should do it in as many aspects of your life as possible. After that use it to self host as much as possible. If you use the google suit of products consider hosting next cloud, if you're one of those weirdos that likes to have smart garbage use home assistant, or whatever. Host what's interesting to you, share it with others, build a userbase, then just fucking abandon them when you lose interest. It's the sysadmin way.

A good systems administrator strives to have as little downtime as possible¹⁾. You should backup anything you care about. You should update into a test environment and then actually test the update. This is to ensure that developers²⁾ don't break your beautiful system with their garbage code. Recovering from a broken update can be a massive pain if you don't have good backups.