This post is basically how I learned to DevOps. It’s not “How to Become a DevOps Engineer”. There is no one answer. I had a lot of luck and a lot of passion. Instead, this is about my career path, and how I ended up the Lead SRE of a multi-national company. First of all, I love CLI tools. My everyday toolkit is zsh, vim, grep, ssh, and git. I learned all these at my first job working on custom hardware.

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Moved this to a Github Repo called reading-list. Feel free to add any to the list via pull request.

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In my current position, we define continuous integration builds for all our projects in a Dockerfile. For us, Docker provides a set of guarantees that are perfect for CI. Docker builds are reproducible. Docker is available on every major OS. Docker produces universal artifacts. Builds are Reproducible Everywhere A standard Jenkins build runs directly on the system. It’s nothing against Jenkins, but if you are just building on a raw node, the underlying instance will have discrepancies.

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This is hard for me to admit, but I’ve failed at hitting the same goal every year for the last 10 years. I want to pass the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). The test is broken into levels N5 -> N1. Each level tests your reading and listening skills. N5 is basic Japanese where N1 is hard enough to make fluent speakers second guess their education. The test is a bureaucratic take on Japanese language and your mastery over it.

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Paying for website hosting is passé. You can easily host with Wordpress, Tumblr, or many other solutions. The downside to these free hosted services (applications, really) is free means you’re the product one way or another. Maybe they put adds on your blog, maybe they sell your data. Also, what happens if that company goes under? Where does your corner of the internet go? I’m a proponent of not relying on other services to build my content if I can help it.

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