You don’t have to be an engineer to be be a racing driver, but you do have to have Mechanical Sympathy.
Jackie Stewart, racing legend
You don’t need to be a devops engineer to be a good software engineer. But it helps to have mechanical sympathy.
One of my favorite terms in the industry is mechanical sympathy. Its defined as having an understanding of how a tool you use, operates best (AWS Well-Architected).
A lot of engineers work or have worked or want to work in environments where tools like Kubernetes is being used to orchestrate the containers for the applications which they develop.
Even though most of these engineers do not need to concern themselves with interacting the underlying infrastructure. I argue that in most every case, having mechanical sympathy helps them become better engineers. They understand the limits, constraints and most importantly the capabilities for the system their application is running.
When I was transitioning from a Fullstack engineering role into a more backend specific role in 2017 one of my former coworkers held a mini workshop on Kubernetes during lunch at the company we used to work for. This workshop explained to me the basics of Kubernetes with a hands on approach and I started to gain some level of understanding what this was all about. The course gave me the exact amount of information that I needed to understand my company’s conversations around infrastructure and allowed me to build upon that knowledge and figure out more things on my own when I needed to. Since then I have worked on almost the entire spectrum of the stack and the transition was smoother because of the mechanical sympathy I had.
I honestly believe that gaining that small amount of mechanical sympathy helped me to become a better engineer than I would have been without it.
Another purpose of this post is that I want to tell you about how I want to pay it forward. I am creating a course which I am going to launch at the end of the summer. The course is a practical hands-on course on Kubernetes and like the name indicates it is designed to help you understand and make peace with this controversial and complicated subject. You can find it at https://zenkubernetes.com.
If this is something that you think might be useful to you feel free to sign up to the mailing list for a earlybird special discount.
P.S.
The course is still in closed beta but any feedback you might have on the topics or modules is greatly appreciated.
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