That’s more or less how I got my first job back in the 90s. A buddy and I started hanging out at the local computer store. We discovered Linux because we wanted to run an Amiga emulator and a little later when the store wanted to start as an ISP, this was the time of local/long distance calls, so local ISPs were a thing, we got hired and build it all from scratch. Radius server, smtpd etc. everything based on the standard *nix tools, except the customer db/app which we wrote ourselves. We both dropped out of computer science for this and now almost 30 years later neither of us finished school, but both still work in tech. These were the wild days of the young Internet and I doubt it’s something that would really work these days.