About

I’m Skyler King — a career changer turned network engineering and security student at WGU, based in Utah. Before tech, I worked as a Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant. I traded ADLs for ACLs, and I haven’t looked back.

How I got here #

It started with tinkering. I liked building my own PCs, which led to buying my first NAS, which led to the first time I actually watched devices find and talk to each other across my LAN. That was the hook — but I didn’t have a name for what I wanted to do yet.

That part came later. I was doing concussion rehab at a small startup, and one of my last clients was a software engineer at Google on the Google Fiber side. We got talking about how he ended up in software and what other paths existed in IT, and that’s the conversation where I first heard the term “network engineer.” I went home, did the research, watched every “day in the life” video I could find, and decided that was it.

What I’m working toward #

I’m looking for my first network or cloud engineering role. I’m most interested in enterprise networking, network automation, and infrastructure that actually works when you need it to. My background in healthcare taught me that reliability isn’t optional — it’s the whole point.

Next on the bench: a hybrid Active Directory lab with Entra ID and Azure AD Connect, followed by an Azure hub-and-spoke network lab to round out the cloud side.

The homelab #

Two Proxmox nodes, 17 VMs and LXCs, 7 VLANs, OPNsense firewall, Cisco switches, Unifi wireless. My main desktop runs Windows 11, but I live in Linux for the work that matters — my laptop dual-boots Zorin OS and Windows 11, and the lab itself is Linux-first: Ubuntu Server for general workloads, Rocky Linux for RHEL-family practice, Kali for security tooling, and REMnux for malware analysis, with OPNsense (FreeBSD) on the perimeter and TrueNAS plus Synology handling storage.

I use it to test everything I’m learning — from OSPF adjacencies to automated documentation pipelines. You can explore the interactive topology diagram if you’re curious.

Off the clock #

I write tutorials and tech-news commentary on networking, the CCNA, and homelab work under @moshthesubnet on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn under Skyler King, with YouTube Shorts on deck. If something I learned saved me hours, it usually ends up there.

Certifications #

CompTIA Project+ and Security+ are in progress.