We stopped paying for certifications and built an internal "Lab" instead

I’ve spent the last 15+ years in the trenches, first as a backend product engineer and now running an SRE/DevOps firm. One thing that consistently annoys me is the "Certification Hoarders"

These people _just_ do certifications, not actual work. Like, they can talk about all the theoretical stuff that's covered in certifications but they don't have any production experience. They haven't really _applied_ their knowledge on actual work.

Since I run my own boutique tech services company, I decided to address this "gap" by building an engineering laboratory we call Prayogshala.

Engineers should focus on "lities" - availability, maintainability, reliability, so we decided to build these habits in them ourselves.