I'm asking this question of all SRE's in this thread: How did you develop the necessary skills required for an SRE role? It's my dream job but I feel I'll never be intelligent enough. My current job in an ISP NOC doesn't give me tons of room to develop the skills required for an SRE role, I script/code and create small projects outside of work, but the entry level for SRE just looks so high compared to what I feel I could ever achieve.
Reading is a good place to start. Find places where people describe their system architecture, and work your way through it, trying to understand why they make the choices they do. If you come across concepts you're not familiar with, look them up on Wikipedia or Google and keep digging until you do understand them. Ask questions if you need to - StackOverflow and ServerFault are good for this.
