As a unix sysadmin in the early 90s, I liked to understand as much as I could about the tech that supported the systems I supported. All my clients used NFS so I dug into the guts of RPC until I could write my own services and publish them via portmap.

Weirdly that nerd snipe landed me two different jobs! People wanted to build network-based services and that was one of the quickest ways to do it.