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)
The Story So Far… (Part 4)

Last time on Darrell Tang Z! A new position again! Validation at the hands of a SaaS company! But will he be able to handle new environments and Operating Systems?

Ops to Dev

I made the first step by starting with Ops. I was delighted to have my day filled with typical SysAdmin duties but in Linux. I spent time learning how to expand disks, rotate logs, change config files, check services, and all the other associated tasks but most importantly, I started updating and maintaining production systems that were serving software directly to clients. I was first exposed to Chef and the realm of configuration management and that led to git, the Version Control Software (VCS) that housed and revisioned all of those configurations.

In my studies to land this position, I had learned Python to a passing degree, enough to make HTTP calls to public APIs and parse the return data, but most of my debugging and coding was still done in a shell, (the Python IDLE, used as a command line). I had committed some of the code to a public Github account (don't judge those projects, if you find them, I was very new!) but hadn't realized the power that git offers. While I was modifying application configs, updating app versions, and deploying upgrades, I learned why the versioning was so powerful in reverting and rolling back changes (the hard way of course)!

Eventually, I was tasked to work with a Senior Devops Engineer on a Terraform project creating VMs in Vsphere, my first exposure to infrastructure-as-code. That led to more and more involvement in Devops types of work, projects, and an eventual promotion. Along the way, I taught myself Golang, started supporting a microservices-architected product, worked on building resources in AWS, and weathered a global pandemic.

At the time of my promotion to a Site Reliability Engineer position it was 2021 which means that from my initial decision to enter the space in 2016, a full 5 years had passed.

Part 6, the end, next time!

Darrell