My name is Austin Thor and this my journey to DevOps!
The main purpose for this blog is to document my own journey in the Tech Industry, and especially in the world of DevOps. As someone who is just starting out in the field of DevOps and all things Software related, I think it would be nice to share my own thoughts on new technology, current technology, and my own experience to hopefully help others who are starting down similar career paths. To further explain my love and interest for DevOps, let me share a bit about who I am and my background.
I am currently 27 years old, have 2 beautiful boys who keep be insanely busy, and a saint of a wife who gets to put up with us 3. My journey began after I graduated highschool in 2013. I would say that I was one of the few people who actually knew what they wanted to do. Yeah, I was THAT kid. I wanted to be the next Dr. Dre and produce a ton of hit songs that everyone hears on the radio. You laugh now, but it gets worse. I was ambitious and so determined that I ignored all red flags of it all. Luckily, I had supporting parents and friends that were always encouraging in my journey to becoming a hit music producer. Visit journeytomusicproduction.com to follow more. Just joking, there is no website! My first year of music school in college was a complete and utter failure. If you did not know, if you study music in college, you have to REALLY like music. And I mean, REALLY like it. You will have to practice till 3:00 am and wake up at 6:00 am just to perform the piece of music that you were practicing. Taking tests in music school consisted of singing scales and knowledge of music theory. Not at all what I had imagine. I thought music school would be more hands on with getting to learn how music is produced and how to record a hit record but I had music classes that did not make much sense to my career or major. I guess that’s college for you though. I remembered having a class that taught you how to breath for singing. I mean, if I was a singer, which I am not, I maybe would have found the class more helpful. And maybe it’s different at other colleges than what I experienced but I knew after my first year that it was just not for me. I loved music but going to college for music made me dislike it very much. The ultimate truth to this is that getting into the music industry is extremely difficult, especially if you plan on becoming a well known artist, producer or whatever. In my non-professional opinion, going to college for a profession like music artist or software developer is absolutely not mandatory, and in fact, a lot people do well without going. My one ending point to this is to not discourage people from going to college for music, or even getting into music in general. Just a word of cautious that I wish I would have taken for my own.
After that whole fiasco, I felt like I was at a turning point in my life. Not a clue in the world of what to do with my life at 19, I decided to do what any rational person at 19 does. I joined the military. Looking back at 27 years old now, this moment ended up being one of the best decisions I could have made for myself because it opened up, next to having kids and getting married of course. I also ended up going into the military as having ‘Information Technician’ as my job title so career wise it was a great opportunity to get myself in the realm of computers and technology. My interest in computers started at a fairly young age because I loved gaming. I might get a lot of groans from this but League of Legends was my choice of game. I was terrible at first person shooter games and was not that interested in console gaming. League of Legend just stood out to me as a simple, not so simple, game that was actually really fun. That got me started in building gaming PCs and started my love for computers. So going back to the military, when the recruiter handed me the list of jobs that were opened and I saw that IT was on it, without a second thought, I circled IT and handed the paper back.
Without going into much detail, bootcamp was a 2 month ordeal of getting yelled at and eating crappy food. After bootcamp, you are then shipped off to your specialized schools, which in my case was IT school. There the whole school was essentially a 6 months long Comptia A + prep course that went through the computer basics. The awesome thing about it was that you were able to take the certification at the end but the not so awesome thing was that if you failed it, you would no longer be an IT for the military. You maybe wondering what that means. Well in the Navy, if you do not have a job, you are shipped directly to the fleet as an “undesignated” personnel, who essentially does most of the grunt work on ships, like painting the ship, mopping the decks, and pretty much things no one wants to do. Luckily for me, I passed the certification and got shipped off to the USS Paul Hamilton, which was at the time, stationed in Hawaii. Onboard the ship, we had old legacy systems and computers that were running on Windows Xp. Yep, only the good stuff. Everything was on-prem and the ITs essentially slept next to the server racks so we all go pretty familiar with maintaining and configuring them. It was quite the learning curve but something I was very grateful of. We ran virtual machines that hosted our own mail servers, DNS server, a couple of linux servers and a whole lot of other servers for different use cases. It was an awesome experience learning the ins and out of the systems and infrastructure. Don’t get me wrong, it was a ton of hard work and a lot of ups and downs, but again, easily the best move in my career. I had gotten married, had 2 beautiful kiddos, learned a lot about computer and networking, and most importantly, learned great work ethics and determination for things in life all within the 4 years I served. I would say I owe my current success to the things I learned in the military and do not regret one bit of how things happened.
After the military, I had decided to head back home with my wife and kids and wanted to give college another shot, especially if the military was going to pay for it this time around. I ended up choosing a Computer Science major because although I resisted wanting to learn how to code, as an IT guy, I knew how important it was to learn. During the time I was in school, I ended up working full time as well as an IT Help Desk Analyst where I more or less had the same roles as I did in the military. I would say that juggling a full-time job, full-time school, and having a wife and 2 kids is not for everyone but again, a lot of my grit and determination I had learned in the military had given me a new found spark in life that aided in my success for this moment. After a year so as a IT Help Desk Analyst, I started an internship as an Cloud Operation Engineer and where I currently work at now at the time of writing. Coming from on-prem only infrastructure, cloud computing was such a fascinating concept and one that I think should be adopted in more companies. The ease of use and accessibility to your servers anywhere in the world makes it so convenient. Security is a debated topic regarding cloud but that could be save for another time. I have since moved up from internship into a full-time role as an Associate Cloud Operations Engineer and so far have been loving it. This position opened up a whole new world of software tools and technology which is now why I have a huge passion for DevOps. As a Cloud Engineer, we are working with AWS constantly, along with other tools like ansible, git, opsgenie, and so much more to automate and codify the infrastructure.
So this is my long winded background and history of how and why I got into DevOps and why I am a huge supporter of a DevOps culture.
If you stuck around this long, I want to say thanks for reading and stay tune for more post of my Journey to DevOps.