print("Hello World!")
I bet you've seen that one 1000 times... well make that 1001! I just wanted to introduce myself into the blogging world, let you know what to expect from my future posts and just get started as this isn't really something I've done before.
TL;DR
- Who am I? What do I do? My name is Justin and I'm a Devops Engineer in London.
- Career - Spanning over 10 years starting from Desktop Support -> SysAdmin -> DevOps Engineer
- What to expect - Some of the things I've had the chance to experience / work with presented in the most simple way (tech jargon isn't my strong point and for me felt more like a barrier to learning). Things I wish I knew before I needed to know them and hopefully give the insight to things that I didn't have to others.
Who am I? What do I do?
My name is Justin, a DevOps Engineer working for a Sportsbook Management company in London. I've been working here maybe 8 & half years now because of all the great things I get to do and learn here. Some of the tech stack I get to touch as part of my role are:
- Gitlab (for source control + Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery aka CI/CD)
- Jenkins (building packages)
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Docker (Containers)
- Kubernetes (Container orchestration - think what / when / where / how to run a container and supporting infrastructure)
- Python (part of scripting deployments / custom programs)
- Powershell (deployments / monitoring)
- Linux & Windows Servers (hosting our services)
- CheckMK (one part of our monitoring solution)
- Slack (was it even worth listing this?)
- More that I think I'll add in a later iteration
Career background
The start
I started my career as Frontline Desktop Support / Support Analyst on a trading floor (think Wolf of Wall Street but not as crazy) after deciding that if I was going to potentially work for the rest of my life, might as well be with something I know a little about and enjoy - fixing computers! I then took the Comptia A+ so that I could solidify what I already knew as well as get the chance to even get an interview to show my ability & drive. Here I earned a good working knowledge of:
- Basic networking skills - VLANs / Firewalls & switches / Network patching / Troubleshooting
- Basic troubleshooting skills - Is it even on? Does it have power? Is it connected? What does the error message actually say? Have you googled that error message?
- VMWare - Virtualisation - Think another laptop within your laptop to do things on without physically having another laptop.
- How applications actually fit together - very important as you'll rarely be using something in isolation.
- Soft skills - Talking to people. Translating tech things into "everyday language". Managing deadlines / expectations. Being accountable for your actions / inactions.
These things would become fundamental to the work I do now.
The next step
From here I moved to the company I am with now - I don't actually remember the job title but essentially it was a cross between Desktop Support / Junior SysAdmin in the IT Operations team. Before too long I was promoted to a Windows Systems Administrator. Some of the things I learned in this role:
- Solidified VMWare knowledge - setup from start to finish, preparing / racking / network patching the server, installing the software, creating virtual machines & troubleshooting various things
- Involved in a Data Centre migration - A lot of network troubleshooting here! Not to mention really learning about the monitoring systems and how crucial they were to knowing what is going on in your environment.
- Some of the more advanced Infrastructure concepts & principles - Clustering / Active Directory management / DNS / Config management / Backups / Recovery from problems / Load-balancing / Network storage management / provisioning machine images / introduction to scripted deployments etc
- Working with developers - brand new world here being at the end of the pipeline for getting their software into production.
- Security "best practices" - Nobody wants to get hacked, so think about some level of security at least in all the work you do.
We used to work via Kanban where the developers worked in an Agile way. This often caused bottlenecks in getting things into production because of differing priorities and ways of working. The company decided to restructure which would take me to the next stage of my career.
Enter DevOps
You could say I entered the world of DevOps by complete chance. You could argue that I was always doing DevOps. However we are NOT going to have that argument on whether DevOps is a job role or a culture or both - you can read up about that if are interested otherwise we might be here all day!
Either way I was here, suddenly placed in a new role, in a new team and called a DevOps Engineer and expected to know EVERYTHING from the jump. When I say EVERYTHING I mean EVERYTHING; Docker, Jenkins, querying metrics & log files, build pipelines, source control, Gitlab CI pipelines, all those AWS services like CloudFormation, EC2, ELB, Security Groups etc. I mean if you've ever touched AWS you'll know those things in their own right take time to get up to speed - throw everything else in the mix as well as needing to support a team of 6 developers? lol.
It was the most challenging thing I've ever had to handle at work but the key thing I kept telling myself was "Rome wasn't built in a day. Skill up day by day, brick by brick." With that I then focused on learning maybe one small thing a day until I knew enough to be comfortable being somewhat "self sufficient". That took about a year and a half for me to feel that way. The most difficult part was detangling all the moving parts that make up the DevOps role. In a future post I'll probably try to help with that.
Anyway, recently I've become AWS Certified with the AWS Solutions Architect Associate which I am very proud of. I'll detail that experience in another post. I'm mentioning this at every opportunity I get. I already do this at work when speaking to any decision makers or even those asking for my advice on what we should do!
"As you know I've been studying for the AWS Solutions Architect and I came across a service that would be useful for us to use / optimise what we have..."
What to expect from future posts
In my future posts I'm going to do the following:
- Breakdown the knowledge I've built up over the years in an easy to consume format.
- Explain tech and concepts in ways I wish someone would have just told me as if they were my mentor. So many times reading documentation trying to work out where it fits in. It can seem impossible and once I did it for the first time I was like "is that it?"
- Walkthrough my thought processes when problem solving
- How to's regarding things I use that could be useful for you or match a use case you might have.
Well that's it for now - until next time...
Yours truly,
Justin.
Top comments (1)
It's so well written.🔥
Looking forward to read more of your work and learn from it. 😄