Hello 2020!

Hello! Thanks for stopping by, I do hope you will stay to the end.

TL; DR

Hi first post.
2020 is going to be a great year and the start of another great decade.
Follow along with my journey and hopefully we can grow together in the world of DevOps!

Full blown Story

At the time of writing it's not quiet 2020 but it's only a couple of hours away.

I am writing this in order to introduce myself to the dev world and hopefully gain some followers.

I'd like to firstly reflect on the past decade, which for me as been both challenging and interesting.

I will briefly skip over the first few years, mainly because it's not all too interesting and secondly because it was 10 years ago!

2010 started with Uni and 2014 saw some life experiences that have resulted in a side step / career change leading me up to this very point.

I studied Acoustics in Uni (not guitars, but engineering and science around sound waves) and this naturally progressed into a career in that industry, firstly as a junior consultant then lastly as an acoustic engineer.

In 2014 I became a father, and this was about the same time I picked up a Raspberry Pi and started to tinker with some personal IT projects at home.

A couple of months in and I knew at this point that I wanted to work in IT.

Using the little bit of C# knowledge form uni I manage to land my first IT job in 2015, starting as a junior in both IT Support and Developement for a small 3 person team. I quickly moved into a permanent Software Role taking on some interesting projects, whilst constantly absorbing as much knowledge as possible.

Which brings me to the past 6 months or so.

Current Role

Enter Footasylum a leading retailer of foot wear (what gave it away right?) here in the U.K, who are currently undergoing a "digital journey".

My previous IT role was sort of eCommerce and so I felt at home when I joined Footasylum. The problems somewhat familiar, the nature of the business and business goals not too dissimilar.

I work as part of the platform team here developing microservices that aim to replace a legacy system, that has become some what of a pain point for users and the wider business.

But the team is so much more than that.

Yes we are developing microservices to replace business functionality, however we are also seeding and growing the culture, the attitude, the way in which we work building and delivering software in a concerted effort to help bring DevOps into the business.

Enter 2020 & My DevOps future

DevOps (at least in my understanding) is about delivering quality software safely so that the business can exceed it's goals, for a more structured definition I particularly like the CALMS framework for achieving DevOps.

A culture of working alongside the business; empathising with its cause and sympathising with its customers. Enabling the various departments to be innovative, market distributors because we servie them, we are their enablers.

Automation so we can deliver faster, safer stronger and with 100% confidence every time.

Looking at our systems as a whole and watching their every move, so that we can fail fast see those errors, spot a user trend and react.

Sharing knowledge (because sharing is caring) with team mates, lifting and elevating them to new heights.

This to me is a fascinating concept and one that I truly believe in.

So...

In 2020 I will be taking a change of role from a developer into a DevOps engineer, which will entail aiding the business in getting to its DevOps goal.

In some ways this will be new territory for me, so I am therefore cordially inviting you my reader(s) to join me on this journey as I discuss and dissect various parts along the way, highlighting various pitfalls and traps as well as triumphs and "wins" that may occur.

Stick with me as I (and hopefully you) learn all about taking a business through the DevOps mill.