Scripting and Automation in Network Engineering?

I was already a Linux user in my high school. We had a Linux user group, which especially in the UK, I think was a very rare thing. It just so happened that one of the IT guys was into it and a couple of the six formers were into it. And we'd found some old computers that might be being dropped or whatever and we were allowed to repurvision them with with the door call one. So literally just saying, you know, I'd have a web front end for all of the users and I'd store stuff in a database and I'd save things on a on a network file share,. That was enough to to peak an interest.