Simple, deploy and manage your own code by hand. I know so much ridiculous but very practical "devops stuff" because I've been installing things configuring th

Simple, deploy and manage your own code by hand. I know so much ridiculous but very practical "devops stuff" because I've been installing things configuring them and deploying to them by hand (running the commands or writing scripts) for a long time. It has come in handy so many times. Now that I think of it, it has paid off more than any other technical experience. So now I can sit down behind any devops toolkit and very quickly get up and running or even debug it without having much experience with it. Also managing your own code will help make you a better developer. So in short to learn devops: learn ops by doing it the old fashioned way. Then Ansible, Puppet, Cloud formation, etc... is easy.