About

The Journey

I spent seven years in IT before I finally landed a role as a DevOps Engineer. I started at the bottom. No CS degree, no experience, just a career switcher.

However, I had some basic SQL skills that I’d taught myself in my previous role at a non-profit. This got me my first role. With an appetite for learning, I stepped into the tech world.

I was hired as a service desk analyst but actually ended up working in QA as a manual tester. A couple of years in, I taught myself to program and made the transition into test automation.

I spent a number of years working in test automation and this helped me gain experience with multiple programming languages and tools. I became interested in DevOps after a colleague recommended I read the Phoenix Project. I remember with great fondness learning GitHub Actions and contributing to my first pipeline so that e2e tests would run after every PR merge.

As I had an automation first approach to my QA work I proceeded to free up my time. This allowed me to contribute to frontend development using React, API development with TypeScript and IaC using AWS CDK.

Outside of work I spent some time playing around with Linux. I set up my desktop first with PopOS and then later with Arch. I also started homelabbing. First an Ubuntu server and more recently a k3s cluster.

All of this set me up well to land a DevOps role and be an effective contributor from day one.

Current focus

I didn’t get here by knowing everything upfront. I got here by learning the next thing, over and over. Right now I’m focused on two things: Kubernetes and AWS.

AWS I use daily in my current role, and I want to go deeper, beyond what the job asks of me, into the parts of the ecosystem I haven’t had reason to touch yet. Kubernetes is different. I don’t use it at work, but I’m building hands-on experience with it through my homelab cluster, because I think it’s one of the most valuable skills a DevOps engineer can have right now.

Continuous improvement isn’t a phase for me, it’s the approach that got me here in the first place. Seven years in IT taught me that the learning never really stops, it just changes shape.