Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps
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The document provides essential advice for building a successful career in DevOps, emphasizing the importance of continuous learning, hands-on experience, and developing a broad skill set. Key recommendations include focusing on one area, seeking mentorship, participating in community events, and embracing a mindset open to experimentation and improvement. Ultimately, it suggests that understanding concepts over tools is crucial for long-term success in the DevOps field.
Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps
- 1. DevOps and YouAdvice for Building Your Career Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps
- 2. 1. Be curious and keep learning 2. Start by focusing on one thing 3. Don’t be afraid to try (or break) things 4. Learn a language 5. Find people to learn from and ask questions 6. Attend meetups and conferences 7. Develop a broad skill set over time
- 3. “If you write code, give a shit how it’s deployed. If you run systems, give a shit about what runs on them. Think about the how and why that both the infrastructure and the applications connect.” Klynton Jessop @klyntonj DevOps Engineer HelloSign United States Zach Leslie @xaque208 DevOps Engineer Womply United States “Keep learning. The more you know, the better you’ll be at everything. The more perspective you have, the easier the problems are to solve.” Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps 3
- 4. “You need to constantly learn new technologies and concepts. It is not enough to just read books or articles to gain the knowledge. You need to gain hands-on experience as well. You will also need to be able to connect with people in order to introduce cultural changes. If you are the kind who thinks that “if something is not broken then don’t fix it” is the best policy, then you are probably not suitable. In DevOps, we are always looking for ways to improve and optimize, without breaking what is already working of course.” Kok Hoong Wai @KokhoongWai DevOps Consultant Forest Technologies Singapore 4Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps
- 5. 1. Be curious and keep learning 2. Start by focusing on one thing 3. Don’t be afraid to try (or break) things 4. Learn a language 5. Find people to learn from and ask questions 6. Attend meetups and conferences 7. Develop a broad skill set over time
- 6. “If you are just starting out in your career, then become a subject matter expert (SME) in your field. This could be software or network engineering or as an Agile coach.” “Jump straight into learning a new tool or technical approach that interests you, and use it to make your infrastructure more predictable, reliable, and secure.” Erin Fahy Senior DevOps Engineer Stanford University United States Mike Dilworth @enspect Technical Director - DevOps Capgemini United Kingdom Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps 6
- 7. “The DevOps space is so big! To keep from getting lost at the beginning, I would suggest picking a space and focusing on it. I would ask, ‘Are you more interested in coding than the servers the code runs on?’ If the answer is yes, then I would suggest a focus on development. I could also ask, ‘Do you like debugging hardware and don’t really care what the code looks like?’ If the answer is ‘yes’ to that question, I would suggest a focus on ops. In either case though, I would also recommend keeping tabs on the other skill set and knowing what’s important to people in that role.” Michael Jenkins @managedkaos Linux Engineer United Business Media United States 7Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps
- 8. “Start small and solve those problems first. You may want to ‘automate all the things,’ but those things have things and those too have things. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Make a list from the largest to smallest until you can go no further, and go from there.” Rudy McComb @rudymccomb Senior OpenStack Operations Engineer Mirantis United States 8Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps
- 9. 1. Be curious and keep learning 2. Start by focusing on one thing 3. Don’t be afraid to try (or break) things 4. Learn a language 5. Find people to learn from and ask questions 6. Attend meetups and conferences 7. Develop a broad skill set over time
- 10. “The rise of containers means that it’s easier than ever to set up a system on your laptop and test out something you’re curious about. Read blogs and articles to investigate the trends and latest technologies and if you have the time, try to recreate what they’re talking about!” “Spend time breaking things. With all of the virtualization technology around these days, you can get full environments to break without damaging your machine or losing customer data.” Klynton Jessop @klyntonj DevOps Engineer HelloSign United States Leslie Carr @lesliegeek Senior DevOps Engineer Clover Health United States Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps 10
- 11. “Don’t shy away from writing a bit of code to solve your problem rather than scouring the internet for a solution that someone solved for you. Both approaches have their place.” “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. In fact, fail often, fail royally! Or else you’ll never know how to fix or truly make something better. Understand that there’s a reason why employers pay for experience.” Joe Rodriguez Jr. @r0dr1gu3zjr DevOps/Linux Engineer Rackspace United States Zach Leslie @xaque208 Devops Engineer Womply United States Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps DevOps and You: Advice for Building Your Career | 11
- 12. 1. Be curious and keep learning 2. Start by focusing on one thing 3. Don’t be afraid to try (or break) things 4. Learn a language 5. Find people to learn from and ask questions 6. Attend meetups and conferences 7. Develop a broad skill set over time
- 13. “You’re going to have to have some basic software development skills. It doesn’t mean you need to be a four-year computer science degree expert programmer in order to do this work. You just need to understand how to work like a software developer.” Nigel Kirsten @nigelkersten CIO and VP of Operations Puppet United States Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps 13
- 14. “Master at least one language. This is key to learning how to think like a developer.” Joe Rodriguez Jr. @r0dr1gu3zjr DevOps/Linux Engineer Rackspace United States 14Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps
- 15. 1. Be curious and keep learning 2. Start by focusing on one thing 3. Don’t be afraid to try (or break) things 4. Learn a language 5. Find people to learn from and ask questions 6. Attend meetups and conferences 7. Develop a broad skill set over time
- 16. “Find a mentor. Generic advice is good, but specific advice is great.” “Find role models and ask them what they are doing and why.” Leslie Carr @lesliegeek Senior DevOps Engineer Clover Health United States Rob Nelson @rnelson0 IT Consultant United States Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps 16
- 17. “If you’re a developer, shadow your ops team and see how they deploy your products, look at how they do it and what processes could be improved. As an ops person, look at how your developers deploy their product for testing and QA. You might learn some tricks in how to automate.” Travis Fields @tefields Senior DevOps Engineer Nike United States 17Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps
- 18. “Find someone nice to help show you tricks. Pay attention and look over shoulders. Offer to help. Offer to listen.” “If you can find someone to let you work on a project in a sort of apprentice model, that can go a long way in building your credibility.” Dwayne Melancon @ThatDwayne CTO VP of Research and Development Tripwire United States Amy Marco @Big__Amy Director of Technology Argent United States Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps 18Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps 18
- 19. 1. Be curious and keep learning 2. Start by focusing on one thing 3. Don’t be afraid to try (or break) things 4. Learn a language 5. Find people to learn from and ask questions 6. Attend meetups and conferences 7. Develop a broad skill set over time
- 20. “Attending local meetups and conferences is a great way to meet people and pick up knowledge quickly. I met a lot of people early on in my IT career through my local Linux users group. Nowadays there are a lot of specific groups, depending on where you’re located, for things like Puppet, Docker and DevOps.” Rich Burroughs @richburroughs Operations Engineer Yesmail United States Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps 20
- 21. “Go to local meetups and vendor conferences and be friendly, say hi, introduce yourself, and ask questions to the point that it makes you uncomfortable. The squeaky wheel gets the oil. The answer to your biggest question is just a greeting away. Keep in touch with the people you meet.” Rudy McComb @rudymccomb Senior OpenStack Operations Engineer Mirantis United States 21Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps
- 22. “I think if you’re getting started in DevOps, the best thing you can do is engage with the community, both online and at meetups and conferences. Across the world, there’s a huge community of friendly people sharing the things they’ve learned.” Jon Topper @jtopper Principal Consultant and CTO Scale Factory United Kingdom Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps 22
- 23. 1. Be curious and keep learning 2. Start by focusing on one thing 3. Don’t be afraid to try (or break) things 4. Learn a language 5. Find people to learn from and ask questions 6. Attend meetups and conferences 7. Develop a broad skill set over time
- 24. “Developing a broad skill set is crucial, so learn a little bit about a lot of things, then dig deeper into what interests you. Be platform and language agnostic. Learn to use OS X, Linux, Windows, Solaris, and OpenBSD. Learn to program in Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, and Swift. Learn PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and MongoDB, because DevOps is all about bringing cohesion and automation together across a huge array of platforms and technologies, and you never know what you’ll have to automate next.” Kyle Olsen DevOps Engineer Datapipe United States 24Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps
- 25. “Be prepared to learn many other skills, and aim to become an all-rounder or generalist. This is important for anyone in a transitional phase of their career. It is important to continue learning the other disciplines within the system. If we are looking to create full-stack autonomous teams capable of delivering value end to end, then we need more generalists who are adaptable, flexible and able to react quickly to changing environmental needs.” Mike Dilworth @enspect Technical Director - DevOps Capgemini United Kingdom Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps 25
- 26. “Focus on the concepts, not the tools. Over the course of your career, you’re going to solve the same problem over and over. If you understand the concepts, it’s easier to use whatever tool is best for the job.” Klynton Jessop @klyntonj DevOps Engineer HelloSign United States 26Advice on how to get started — and ahead — in a career in DevOps
- 27. Now ... Go get the DevOps! For much more advice on how to start and grow your career in DevOps, read the full ebook DevOps and You: Advice for Building Your Career at puppet.com/devops-and-you.