This is a series of posts about my journey so far. You can read the previous entries at:

The Story So Far… (Part 1)
The Story So Far… (Part 2)
The Story So Far… (Part 3)

Last time on Darrell Tang Z! The Support Desk was at peace. But everything changed when the stagnation attacked…

Sophomore Slumping

One thing we did not do very well was address technical debt and automate. There was always a lot of discussion about process improvements but who had the time? When you're sprinting, all out, all the time, you don't have any energy left for working on form or technique. And so, I eventually began to feel the sting of burnout.

It was a subtle thing at first which was masked by the desire to move up in the company. I received several promotions over the years and ended up in a hybrid monitoring/NOC position which was also tasked with the role of automation. In reality, it was almost all manual work and firefighting, just less client-facing, focusing primarily on servers and backend infrastructure.

Discontent kept mounting and I spent some time soul-searching and reflecting (with the input of my wonderful wife). After a while, I came to the conclusion that continuing on the SysAdmin career path was not going to be fulfilling long term and started looking for the next chapter. This is where DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering started popping up in my research.

A New Direction

There are as many definitions of DevOps & SRE as there are obscure, SEO-jammed articles. All of which you can find with a Google search so I'll repeat MY definition here: my job as a DevOps engineer is to make things easier and smooth the path for software delivery. There are a million and one tools that I can use to accomplish that goal (which I eventually hope to cover in future emails) but the goal remains that.

Since I had primarily been working in a Windows server environment though, I had a lot of catching up to even begin scratching the surface of those tools. Around 2016, I doubled down on my Linux knowledge, started an AWS course for that sweet, sweet cloud-native foundation, and started learning Python as a programming language. For 2 years I crammed what little free time I had with all of this baseline knowledge, and to be clear, it was 20 minutes at a time. This was not the sort of thing where I sat for 4 hours every weekend cramming, I didn't have that energy.

Where the beginning of my time at the MSP was exciting and new, this was not. I was learning a lot, but having to squeeze the extra time out of already full days was exhausting. In addition, I was relearning how to job search and interview all at the same time! But I persisted, and I eventually landed a position at a fintech as an Operations Engineer to begin my foray into supporting an actual software product instead of corporate IT in general.

Part 5 next time! Keep learning and keep growing!

Darrell