A friend of mine mentioned i should look into DevOps when i mentioned i had starting to learn basic coding and to move industries…he thought it would fit my personality. In any case, I’ve been looking into it and it seems like a very cool combo of systems/it and dev.
I’m still very new and learning the basics ( css, html, javascript ) as far as coding but does anyone have any advice or resources in regards to learning DevOps?
thanks!
Necessary:
Also, tools and workflows and infrastructures used are often highly company specific.
Thanks so much Dan! really appreciate ya taking the time to share with me.
So coding is only a small part of DevOps. DevOps can be thought of as a way to think and do stuff, rather than a tool or something you “use”. You don’t just suddenly “do” DevOps, you need really buy into the idea.
So one of the first things you’d want to know about DevOps is why it matters compared to more traditional approaches to software development. Traditionally you’d take a waterfall approach, but with DevOps you take a vastly more “iterative approach”, where you get feedback, and automate as much as possible. This is a super condensed simplified example, but that’s the main idea driving DevOps. The idea is to iterate and respond to user needs faster, and more efficiently
Now being a DevOps engineer is more or less the same as any other engineer, except you will have to communicate with more people than just your project manager. You might have to interact with operations (IT, tech support etc), other developers, security specialists, etc. DevOps isn’t where you do both development and operations, even though it could be, it’s where everyone with stake into the product gets to provide input at as often as possible.
Generally you will find companies will perform DevOps differently, but the core ideas should always be there.
If you like the sound of being a DevOps engineer, then just stick with learning how to code/program, while also spending some time on getting familiar with more tooling. Stuff like Linux, using the cloud, automation tools, testing, git, Docker are all used heavily in DevOps.
I usually don’t reference paid-for stuff, but I’ve been interested in DevOps since I started out as a dev and never found anything better than The Phoenix Project which is actually a novel about DevOps. It’s a great novel that goes into DevOps in a fun an engaging way. I learned a lot about DevOps without actually trying haha.
The novel follows a lower level IT manager who gets assigned an impossible project to be completed in a few months. The manager is helped by a “guru” like board member who teaches him the “three ways”. Its a fun novel, it does get technical, but I wouldn’t consider it a requirement to actually reading it. Anyone who has ever worked in a job filled with bureaucracy will see themselves somewhere in the book 
There is a handbook that goes into the hard-core details about how to go about DevOps as an organization, but its definitely aimed toward management.
So go out and keep learning, read into what sort of stuff DevOps focuses on and keep on learning those things. Just remember DevOps isn’t some technology, its an idea, hell you could even say its a culture.
wow, thanks so much, gonna check out those books and bookmark these amazing replies…FCC is such an incredible company especially to someone like myself that does not know up from down yet.
@jantelis My understanding is that DevOps is somewhere inbetween programmer and system administrator. I suggest learning a language like Python and practice system administration tasks such as configuring DNS (with Bind), setting up a web server (Apache or Nginx), Postfix (email server), NFS, and Samba. Having a strong understanding of advanced network concepts such as managed switches and routers would come in handy.
Better yet find some people already working in DevOps and ask them about what it is like to work in the field.
thanks so much! appreciate you taking the time to reply
hows is your networking and linux?
I know a drop of networking but Linux and coding is all new to me
i would spin up a few debian or ubuntu boxes and just jump in really
If you will choose to follow DevOps opportunities you need to know that “Dev” in DevOps in most of the cases stands to back-end developer. Literally all my friends who started working as a back-end developers eventually “expanded” their career to DevOps. Considering this, CSS, HTML and in some parts JS point in wrong direction 
i see, would it be still good to know just to be aware of it?
Sure! I personally find Front-End more challenging and definitely way harder to code as the code runs on many machines you don’t control vs. in Back-End it runs on one machine that you control. For this exact reason if one day smart computers start taking developer jobs - it’s not hard to guess who will got the first bullet 
@craftyhydra @jantelis It is better to go with RedHat which is what most businesses use in the industry. Start out with CentOS because it is as close to RedHat as you can get without having to buy a RedHat license.
thanks had not heard of that yet added to my list, used more than aws?