I started my IT career after my first year in university, working as a junior developer in the data management team at an oil&gas drilling company. After moving up to a data warehouse architect position for a few years, I stumbled onto an opportunity to work as a junior SRE for a SaaS oriented company. I then discovered the incredible world of cloud-native applications and the awesome responsibility and knowledge required to fully manage such a monster.
When COVID hit, I took an opportunity to take some time away from work and commit myself to learning everything needed to manage operations and infrastructure. I also studied cybersecurity at my local institute of technology for a year. I always felt the need to understand how things work ‘under the hood’ and not just replicate actions. Anyone can edit a configuration file, but not everyone can know why the configuration is written as it is. Why is it using this dated image and not the latest? Why is it routing traffic through this particular DNS server? I like knowing things even if I never use them much in my day to day because concepts are much harder to forget than minute details like syntax. It also helps to explain what I do to my friends and family in a way that’s interesting and not eye-wateringly technical and boring.
This approach paid off when I landed a devops engineering job working for a defence contractor. I worked there for 3 years and loved applying myself in every aspect. The sad thing is, the Canadian government did not employ any cloud based solutions during my tenure, so we had to do a lot of unorthodox implementations of modern tools to solve problems. While that is cool and creative, it was taxing. Mixed with a few other personal and work factors, I had to take a leave of absence to look after my health. I didn’t spend this time doing nothing though and worked on getting some certifications I’ve always wanted (AWS SA, CompTIA Security+, Terraform Associate).
I am now excited to be back in the workforce and hoping to apply my IaC skills to solve problems in a modern enterprise environment!