Introduction

[00:00:00]
>> I'm gonna be teaching you guys today DevOps for Developers. And this is something that I'm incredibly passionate about, I am a content creator, and this is something I deal with and create content around every single day. I also do it professionally, so I'm very excited to share this with you mostly because of the main title, An introduction to DevOps for developers and its purpose in software development.

[00:00:25]
The main goal that I really want people to be able to take away from this is to be able to confidently go into DevOps at any organization. And simply be able to start applying some of the fundamentals and the practices that I'm gonna be sharing with you guys today.

[00:00:41]
So let's get started. So as an introduction, my name is Erik Reinert. I'm also known as Blackglasses on the interwebs. I'm a senior software engineer, I currently work at a company called Hippo, but I've worked at a few other companies in the past like that. As I said, I'm a content creator, we're TheAltF4Stream on Twitch & YouTube, and I'm basically obsessed with problem solving.

[00:01:04]
One of the things that I started realizing very quickly, especially about what I do is where my passions lie with it and kind of how that plays a role in my job. And so, yeah, one of the things that is really, really big to me is problem solving.

[00:01:22]
To give a further background, I've kind of done a lot of different things. I started out my career in frontend, and I did that for about 2 years, and I really got off actually a CS4 with that. So I was taking phone calls, and I had an opportunity where I started building stuff on the CS4.

[00:01:43]
They started recognizing that, and they were like, hey, we might have an engineer here. And so they actually took me out of customer support, and it's a frontend where I started my career. And that first 2 years was really focused on building frontends for enterprise companies, I worked at a company at the time called Media Temple, you guys may have heard of it.

[00:02:02]
It's a web-hosting company, and my job was really focused on making buttons clickable. [LAUGH] And that was definitely a part of my life for quite some time, and as much fun I had with it, I started realizing that frontend might not be exactly my true passion in life.

[00:02:21]
After that, I decided I was just gonna start following my curiosity. I didn't really know how to get to the job I wanted or my dream job, but I knew that if I followed my curiosity, I could hopefully get there. And so from there, I took 2 years into backend, I actually just jumped to a completely different company, I said, I feel like doing backend now.

[00:02:40]
And so I took that and I ran with that, I started building backends for a iOS mobile app. And another thing too is I jumped into it with very little knowledge. A lot of what I have focused on is really been around my curiosity around things and using that as something to kinda guide me.

[00:03:00]
As you do when you start dealing with backend and stuff like that, I think it's very common for a lot people to start getting fascinated with other parts of the stack or the whole entire stack, you know what I mean? You conquer frontend in some regard, and then you get to backend and you're like, okay, I can do it all.

[00:03:15]
And I thought I could too. And so I actually took another job after that for about 2 years, where I started working in fullstack. And this is really, I think, where I started experiencing, as an engineer, what DevOps felt like. Because in that scenario with fullstack, you're getting closer to owning much more of the actual bottom up all of it.

[00:03:37]
And that really started opening up new opportunities for me in the sense of where I was troubleshooting the stack in a different way that I'd never done before. I was looking at the stack in a different way, I wasn't compartmentalized to just one thing. I wasn't just focused on frontend, I wasn't just focused on backend, I was started to do both.

[00:03:55]
However, I again followed my curiosity and started realizing that one of the things I loved about this was just problem solving. I love being able to look at the entire stack and say like, okay, here's where I can be super helpful or here's where we can try and solve this problem and things like that.

[00:04:14]
And again, I started out my career moving to Los Angeles as a writer and director, and then somehow ended up in engineering [LAUGH] and doing what I do now. So none of this was planned, none of this was something I expected to even do. And again, I followed my curiosity of problem solving with that.

[00:04:37]
And so I had a friend, actually who works in DevOps, and he was like, hey, you might be interested in looking at problems from a much more higher organizational level than just a specific product or things like that. And so I did it again, I moved to a different company, and when I moved to my different company, I had an opportunity to readdress my title.

[00:04:59]
And so I was like, you know what, I've already done frontend, I've already done backend, and I've done fullstack now, why don't we try DevOps? And yeah, it was incredible, I never thought that I would, especially so early in my career, be so passionate about something that I really love doing.

[00:05:17]
And there's reason to why I'm sharing this too, there's a couple of reasons. The first off is that DevOps is definitely a collection of knowledge over a period of time. It is not in some regard something that is just, you pick up a book and you start reading about it.

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Even this course is, as much as I'm gonna try and get you guys understanding what DevOps is, a lot of it is still just gonna be experience. So when we talk about getting into DevOps, I'm not saying you need to have eight plus years before you go into it, but what I am saying is that, just showing from my own path, my own course, it helps.

[00:05:56]
[LAUGH] It helps a lot, especially when you've got crazy circumstances that you're in.
>> If you have an interest in DevOps, would you recommend it for somebody who's entering into the field or entering into tech in general?
>> I don't think that it's not possible for you to go in DevOps, especially if you're just entering the industry.

[00:06:16]
I think the thing that you have to be open minded is is just you're not gonna know everything. There are people who even if they're not in DevOps are going to be able to walk up to a problem and simply solve it quicker because they've been through it.

[00:06:28]
So, I definitely think it's possible, I think, again, it's gonna be more of a learning experience before you start getting comfortable with, maybe the company you're at, the stack you're dealing with, and things like that. We're gonna dive into DevOps, but we're really gonna start from scratch with it.

[00:06:44]
And again, the big point here is that I want to basically make you unlearn everything you know about DevOps. There's a really great quote that I know from a musician that I'm not gonna say so I don't get judged about it, but the quote is good, which is for you to understand me, you first have to unlearn everything about me.

[00:07:03]
And that's just the common scenario of, we're so used to tabloids and other things like that. It's hard to understand maybe somebody, your idol, or something like that because you're not just getting the real picture. And I realized that that's kind of DevOps right now. [LAUGH] There's a lot of things out there that are kind of misleading, and so I really wanna start from scratch.

[00:07:28]
Okay, so I'm gonna give you first starters the more watered-down version of it, but it is pretty straightforward version of it. To enter a career in DevOps, it is helpful to have an experience in both software development and IT operations. This may include experience with coding and scripting languages, as well as experience with systems administration and infrastructure management.

[00:07:50]
Again, I'm not saying that this is a requirement, it's helpful, right? Having a strong understanding of collaboration and communication tools, methodologies, such as agile and lean principles, can be beneficial. Again, not required but beneficial. It is also important to have a passion for continuous learning and staying up-to-date with the latest technologies and best practices in the field.

[00:08:12]
So, as I just said, right before we even got to this introduction by kind of shaping my career path and my interests, you might be able to start seeing why I'm so interested in DevOps and things like that. You can definitely take the knowledge that you have and apply it to problem solving at a much higher level.

[00:08:33]
And again, it's not a circumstance where you need to know everything about a specific language, we're not talking about that here. What we're talking about is that we just need to know that if a service is down and it's written in Go or JavaScript or whatever, hopefully, you can debug that.

[00:08:51]
[LAUGH] That's kind of the job that we need to be able to do. And again, I think the last part is really important. It's important to have passion for continuous learning. We live in an industry right now that is so fast and updating constantly that if you're not staying up-to-date with either practices, principles, strategies, things like that, you might realize that you're doing old things that have been improved upon 10, 15 years ago.

[00:09:25]
And you're just still doing them because that's the practice you're used to. So this, again, is a very simple but hopefully more well defined version of kind of what DevOps means as a term. Basically, the best way of looking at it is DevOps is understanding first and its tools second.

[00:09:50]
DevOps is a philosophy, it is not a technology. And so I do wanna note that if your first step into DevOps is to look at a tool, then you might not be looking at DevOps correctly. And to be fair, a lot of companies do that. It's about understanding the problem first and then saying, okay, what are the tools that we can use to solve this problem?

[00:10:17]
Not saying, I just heard about a really cool tool, maybe that'll solve our problem. That's not really the case here. And I actually, I'm gonna exemplify this in our course today.