I recently started mentoring a young junior developer who wanted to learn about DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure Engineering.I heard the saying "teach once, learn twice" where in teaching something, you learn the subject better yourself once from my martial arts teaching long ago, and I agree.
The mentoring experience gave me an opportunity to dive into and examine what DevOps is, how it's supposed to be used and more importantly in my opinion, how and why it fails out in the real world.
I've been thinking about the idea behind the saying "it's not what you know, its who you know" as I've gone about various tasks over the last couple of weeks.
People usually say this when they're looking for work, and it's either they're not getting any traction because they don't know anyone, or they're getting their foot in the door because they know someone.
I have to say this has been my experience as well.
It's that time of year again when companies ramp up a little crazier as teams try to get any work in before a brown out (aka change freeze). A change freeze is where companies will freeze all changes to production, or production-affecting systems in order to provider stability over the coming break as staff will be taking time away from these systems at the same time customers may be ramping up their use as they take time off work to get the all important last minute xmas shopping done.
The last thing the company wants is a bad customer experience during these emotional... I mean festive times, due to systems crashing, and then a slower than usual response because Greg, who usually fixes things in an hour is away up north with the family, and Joe hasn't fixed this issue before and it takes him 4 x as long.
In recent times the issue of leadership has been a factor in the quality and felt experience of projects I have been across in my contracting career. These have ranged from feeling like everyone's a leader, having their own say and ideas on where the project should be going, to completely zero ideas on what the team is doing and everyone suddenly wants to know what the floor looks like when they're asked who's supposed to be doing what.
Going over the holiday period and into the new year, as a contractor, usually means time off work, which means you're not getting paid. If you haven't been keeping your finances in check, this might be cause for alarm, anxiety, even panic. Otherwise, its par for the course of the contractors life.
“There may be people that have more talent than you, but theres no excuse for anyone to work harder than you do.” - Derek Jeter.
Getting training in order to acquire the skills you need to do your job as well as to grow your skillset to open your options career-wise is a key consideration for anyone working in I.T.
In Part 1, we looked at the apps and other tools that I come across and use not only in my day to day work as a contractor, but also in my personal projects as well.
I wanted to list and give a brief overview and explanation of why I use the things I do, for the things I do ;)
In this post I'm going to look at Project Management tools and well as the applications and tools I use for CI/CD and 'DevOps' work.
In your professional life, you're going to come across and use a wide range of applications and tools to get the job done. I'm always amazed when looking over someone's shoulder (with their permission of course haha) and seeing how they do their "thing", even if we both do the same job, people will have their favourite apps and ways of doing things (some of it is insightful, others - annoying haha).
I wanted to list and give a brief overview and explanation of why I use the things I do, for the things I do ;)
In this post I'm going to look at the Operating System, text editors, Terminals and finally Desktop Management tools.
In this day there's little privacy, everyone's information and what they're up to is all over social media and if you want to find out what people are saying, where they work what they do - its all online.
So it stands to reason that what you do for work, what you can do skills wise, is also available online.
the pros and cons of the way things are right now with respect to our information is probably a topic for another time, but for the purposes of this post our lives and our information is out there for everyone to see and it is what it is.
My mum would always tell my brothers and I
"a good name is better than a pretty face"
Guys in my position are generally pretty busy people. We're usually outnumbered by requests, situations, questions, tasks and people to help, manage or get back to.
Not to blow our collective horns for those of us who identify with this space, but we're pretty scarce and in high demand.
Not because we're rockstars (far from it).
But we possess a cross-section of skills and experience, not deliberately acquired (in my case anyway), but that has been built up due to the need for them at various times in our careers.