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James Shipman
James Shipman

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Thoughts on the Past Year and my Career Path Moving Forward

Working From Home

From a coding bootcamp through a year and a half of working at a great company, I've been working from home. This has been a blessing, I moved from a tiny apartment to a lovely home where I feel safe and my family has room to thrive.

My most natural self needs to interact with people (the extrovert in me) so working from home I've had to figure out new ways of staying focused and "full brained" on the task(s) at hand. My most recent experience has shown me I have space to learn more techniques to up my game and I am using this time between jobs to lean into learning these.

DevOps

Where does DevOps fit in this? For me it ties in with the last year and half. I was given an internal project at my previous company to build out CI/CD pipelines. Cool; at the time I didn't even know what that was; little did I know how large of a world was just stepping into. Fast forward roughly 8 months and what I had built had matured into a stable, powerful and adaptable pipeline for website development and deployment. I also feel head over heals this work, it clicked with me like no other work I've done in 15 to 20 years.

In just the 2 weeks I've been job searching I have had the time to dig deeper into the DevOps universe. I really like and excited about the fact that it's not a highly established, formalized or well-defined practice yet. It's fluid and little different for each company. The overall methodology / philosophy of a collaborative team of different skill sets coming together to work across walls (get rid of them really) to build automated, scalable, testable and adaptable IT solutions is right up my alley.

This collaborative, cross-functional way of working speaks to me, it calls back to the days that I was in theatre as a performer and as a technician and director. DevOps, to put it simply, is how I've always wanted to work in IT.

Let's do This!

So I'm back on the market, looking hard at the roles that focus or want a focus in DevOps processes.

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