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)
The Story So Far… (Part 5)

Last time on Darrell Tang Z! We made it. We started from the bottom, now we here.

Why Should You Listen To Me?! (Right To Left)

The Devops philosophy has a concept of "shifting left". The image below should help illustrate:

The analogy is that shifting left pushes what used to be manual processes done by Operations toward the realm of Development. Infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and many other practices are designed to catch errors and problems much earlier in the overall process before it hits a production environment and, inevitably, users.

In my case, the path I took was from right to left, in that I acquired the skills starting on the Operations end of the spectrum and eventually moved toward the development side. I know that I'm surely not the only one to have done it this way but I had lots of challenges along the way. One of which was finding resources that connected the System Administration skills I had to their contextual purpose in the DevOps space. I'm hoping to provide people with a way to relate what they already know to new tools and new ways of thinking to solve those problems. If the problem is foreign, I want to draw parallels that can easily describe the problem in a way that people can relate to their existing knowledge.

Paying It Forward

I have had so much support, patience, and faith from so many people along the way. The passion I have for the field and how it has transformed my life is something I want anyone interested to experience. That is the driving motivation behind my starting this newsletter. I have shared this journey with many personal acquaintances but want to help many, many more. The upcoming topics will be a mix of the life lessons, technical lessons, and errata that I've picked up along the way. If someone receives SOME FRACTION of benefit from this writing, I'll be beyond grateful. If you're reading this at the time of its initial posting, thank you so much for supporting me! If you're stumbling on this as an archived post, I hope that everything that follows proves to be an incredible resource for you.

Keep learning and keep growing!

Darrell