I'm a Solutions Engineer at Weill Cornell Medicine, and I've worked in IT since 2011. The last several years have been spent where infrastructure, security, and documentation overlap. Most of what I do comes down to one thing: figuring out how a sprawling set of systems actually fits together, then turning that into something a team can act on.
In practice, that means mapping the dependencies nobody knew existed, recording why a decision was made, and keeping that knowledge in the open so no one has to reverse-engineer it later.
None of that clocks out at five. I'd rather build and self-host a tool than rent one, partly to learn how it works, and partly for the quiet satisfaction of running it myself. My homelab is a perpetual, rewarding work in progress, and I document it the same way I would at work. Some of those decision records are public.
Outside of that, I try to keep things simple: own less, read more, play guitar, and lift weights. Most of my time, though, goes to my wife and two kids, which is exactly where I want it.