5 ms·

DigitalOcean has been instrumental in helping me transition from a college graduate into a professional developer who can build and design entire backends. Tho

DigitalOcean has been instrumental in helping me transition from a college graduate into a professional developer who can build and design entire backends. Those 5$/mo droplets let me explore a lot of software and run proper production-like benchmarks for my own learning. Over time I moved a lot of my personal projects and infra over to DO (and started working on new ones now that I had a good provider to host them on). And now with the new managed offerrings for the CORE technologies people need (databases, caches, K8S etc.) I'm happy to see that I can start being a little more productive with my side projects. So, in essence I want to thank the people at DigitalOcean for what they've built and continue to build.

raiyu 7y ago
Thank you for sharing. Our goal with DigitalOcean was always to help more people get involved with technology. The community team that is one of the pillars of DigitalOcean was built by Etel. She herself went through this transition. She graduated college with a liberal arts degree and was working as a bartender because she couldn't get another job. I gave her a book on programming and told her that if she figured it out I would figure out a way to get her a job. She indeed did figure it out and when DigitalOcean was able to start hiring, she was the first hire we made. Initially she worked customer support, and soon after we put her in charge of building "community". She wrote the first several hundred articles herself. She then went on to build an entire team of writers and editors and community managers. And that team also created amazing events both on a local scale as well as Hacktoberfest. So many people have been thankful for to us for our articles and resources, but they wouldn't be what they are without people like Etel. It's really an expression of who she is and her beliefs and values as a person. That's why we want to continue investing in community and ensure that those individual developers just getting started feel like they truly have a home at DigitalOcean. Because those are the very same people that built DigitalOcean in the first place.
- hashhar 7y ago
  I can honestly say that one of the reasons people hop onto DO is due to those amazing tutorials and documentations. I know I was. It's surprising really that in all the praise I threw to DigitalOcean the awesome documentation and tutorials flew under my radar. That's not to say that I don't value them. Rather the complete opposite. They had become such an integral part of my life when getting my hands wet with a new technology or a tool or setting up any new software or system that I completely forgot that they were something that someone invested a lot of time writing. I was still in college/starting out then and had never learned that most developers don't document things (let alone write tutorials). I believed there must be internal websites similar to DO's documentation and tutorials in each company and took DO for granted. It'd be really great if you could share my thoughts about how great and instrumental the documentation and tutorials have been to Etel and the team specially. Also, have a great weekend.
  - raiyu 7y ago
    Absolutely!
  - Florin_Andrei 7y ago
    > I can honestly say that one of the reasons people hop onto DO is due to those amazing tutorials and documentations. Seconded.
    - swuecho 7y ago
      more and more my google searches lead to DO document and tutorials.
      - tracker1 7y ago
        I've actually added the site into searches for some things, since the tutorials are usually better. Though some should maybe be updated to current versions now and then, it's still overall much better than the rest of the internet in general.
  - nurettin 7y ago
    There is almost always a comprehensive article with good overview covering "How to set up X" on their website so when I see it in the search results that's the first place I choose. Even if I don't use DO for that particular project.
  - netwanderer3 7y ago
    DigitalOcean's tutorials are second to none indeed. It always feels like the writers just know exactly what questions you're having.
    - 0ldblu3 7y ago
      And who you are. DO's tutorials are so laser-focused on the correct user persona, it's quite impressive how well they understand me.
- epiphanitus 7y ago
  I was in a similar position not too long ago. I had nothing but a liberal arts degree, a miserable first career and a yawning resume gap. I just stumbled into coding and I was completely addicted. After many months cobbling together a frankenstinean tangle of Kubernetes clusters, db instances and even an AI that could write bad limericks, I got a job as a backend engineer. You have to work your tail off in this job but its a life changing opportunity in a field where you get to make things for a living and there's always something new to learn. Thank you thank you thank you cloud providers for making compute power so cheap. I realize you do it because you know you will eventually make the money back 10000x over when we persuade our bosses to lock in to your ecosystem, but I don't care. (Capitalism is not perfect, but hey, sometimes it can be okay) DO tutorials are amazing, by the way. I learned so many things from your docs, it shows a lot of hard work by some very talented people.
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > I was in a similar position not too long ago. I had nothing but a liberal arts degree, a miserable first career and a yawning resume gap. I just stumbled into coding and I was completely addicted. ... its a life changing opportunity in a field where you get to make things for a living and there's always something new to learn. Thank you thank you thank you cloud providers Programming in the 2010s and 2020s is kind of like union labor work back in the 1950 and 1960s: not instantaneous riches, but meaningful work that leads to a decent middle to upper class life. Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries. What is frustrating though is that if the U.S. actually focused on developing its talent, we could maintain the lead for another decade or two longer than if we just sit on our hands. With that extra lead time, we could come up with the next major industry (AI-training? quantum computer programming?), but as it stands now, many other countries will be equally poised to jump on the next opportunity and we'll squander our lead forever.
    - epiphanitus 7y ago
      >> Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries. What is frustrating though is that if the U.S. actually focused on developing its talent, we could maintain the lead for another decade or two longer than if we just sit on our hands. With that extra lead time, we could come up with the next major industry (AI-training? quantum computer programming?), but as it stands now, many other countries will be equally poised to jump on the next opportunity and we'll squander our lead forever. Agreed. I have several (very smart) coworkers in other countries. And our political system is an atrocious thing to watch these days. Whatever happened to compromise? I don't think anybody really knows for sure what the future holds. The thing is with cloud computing and with the spread of technology into the developing world they will likely be needing engineers too. Of course that may not happen if the software world is so carved up that all of the business goes to a handful of companies that are employing a fixed number of people and concentrating the gains. And if Elon Musk has a breakthrough with neuralink, then maybe we'll all be out of a job. Why write code when you can think print('hello world')? On the other hand, big players can get disrupted, technology can change, and its not like every human being has the capacity/stomach for the abstract problem solving we do day to day.
- abstatic 7y ago
  Thanks for taking out the time to share this. Really made my day! DO has one of the best content releated to programming. Keep it up!
ivankolev 7y ago
Almost the same path for me, DO hits the sweetspot for me in terms of features, and the new offerings are looking very pragmatic and thought-out. Thanks DO, I am defunitely increasing my spend on your product!
quickthrower2 7y ago
Yeah the way I see digital ocean (from when I first saw it years ago) is you can get professional cloud computing with quick spin ups etc. at a reasonable price. The basic stuff you need - a VM which you can run whatever you want on. I am hosting a side project on a $5 droplet it and sometimes I forget I use Digital Ocean (which is a good thing :-). Just bash command to install NodeJS etc. and a single VM but the uptime has been incredible.

raiyu 7y ago

Thank you for sharing. Our goal with DigitalOcean was always to help more people get involved with technology. The community team that is one of the pillars of DigitalOcean was built by Etel. She herself went through this transition. She graduated college with a liberal arts degree and was working as a bartender because she couldn't get another job. I gave her a book on programming and told her that if she figured it out I would figure out a way to get her a job. She indeed did figure it out and when DigitalOcean was able to start hiring, she was the first hire we made. Initially she worked customer support, and soon after we put her in charge of building "community". She wrote the first several hundred articles herself. She then went on to build an entire team of writers and editors and community managers. And that team also created amazing events both on a local scale as well as Hacktoberfest. So many people have been thankful for to us for our articles and resources, but they wouldn't be what they are without people like Etel. It's really an expression of who she is and her beliefs and values as a person. That's why we want to continue investing in community and ensure that those individual developers just getting started feel like they truly have a home at DigitalOcean. Because those are the very same people that built DigitalOcean in the first place.

hashhar 7y ago
I can honestly say that one of the reasons people hop onto DO is due to those amazing tutorials and documentations. I know I was. It's surprising really that in all the praise I threw to DigitalOcean the awesome documentation and tutorials flew under my radar. That's not to say that I don't value them. Rather the complete opposite. They had become such an integral part of my life when getting my hands wet with a new technology or a tool or setting up any new software or system that I completely forgot that they were something that someone invested a lot of time writing. I was still in college/starting out then and had never learned that most developers don't document things (let alone write tutorials). I believed there must be internal websites similar to DO's documentation and tutorials in each company and took DO for granted. It'd be really great if you could share my thoughts about how great and instrumental the documentation and tutorials have been to Etel and the team specially. Also, have a great weekend.
- raiyu 7y ago
  Absolutely!
- Florin_Andrei 7y ago
  > I can honestly say that one of the reasons people hop onto DO is due to those amazing tutorials and documentations. Seconded.
  - swuecho 7y ago
    more and more my google searches lead to DO document and tutorials.
    - tracker1 7y ago
      I've actually added the site into searches for some things, since the tutorials are usually better. Though some should maybe be updated to current versions now and then, it's still overall much better than the rest of the internet in general.
- nurettin 7y ago
  There is almost always a comprehensive article with good overview covering "How to set up X" on their website so when I see it in the search results that's the first place I choose. Even if I don't use DO for that particular project.
- netwanderer3 7y ago
  DigitalOcean's tutorials are second to none indeed. It always feels like the writers just know exactly what questions you're having.
  - 0ldblu3 7y ago
    And who you are. DO's tutorials are so laser-focused on the correct user persona, it's quite impressive how well they understand me.
epiphanitus 7y ago
I was in a similar position not too long ago. I had nothing but a liberal arts degree, a miserable first career and a yawning resume gap. I just stumbled into coding and I was completely addicted. After many months cobbling together a frankenstinean tangle of Kubernetes clusters, db instances and even an AI that could write bad limericks, I got a job as a backend engineer. You have to work your tail off in this job but its a life changing opportunity in a field where you get to make things for a living and there's always something new to learn. Thank you thank you thank you cloud providers for making compute power so cheap. I realize you do it because you know you will eventually make the money back 10000x over when we persuade our bosses to lock in to your ecosystem, but I don't care. (Capitalism is not perfect, but hey, sometimes it can be okay) DO tutorials are amazing, by the way. I learned so many things from your docs, it shows a lot of hard work by some very talented people.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > I was in a similar position not too long ago. I had nothing but a liberal arts degree, a miserable first career and a yawning resume gap. I just stumbled into coding and I was completely addicted. ... its a life changing opportunity in a field where you get to make things for a living and there's always something new to learn. Thank you thank you thank you cloud providers Programming in the 2010s and 2020s is kind of like union labor work back in the 1950 and 1960s: not instantaneous riches, but meaningful work that leads to a decent middle to upper class life. Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries. What is frustrating though is that if the U.S. actually focused on developing its talent, we could maintain the lead for another decade or two longer than if we just sit on our hands. With that extra lead time, we could come up with the next major industry (AI-training? quantum computer programming?), but as it stands now, many other countries will be equally poised to jump on the next opportunity and we'll squander our lead forever.
  - epiphanitus 7y ago
    >> Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries. What is frustrating though is that if the U.S. actually focused on developing its talent, we could maintain the lead for another decade or two longer than if we just sit on our hands. With that extra lead time, we could come up with the next major industry (AI-training? quantum computer programming?), but as it stands now, many other countries will be equally poised to jump on the next opportunity and we'll squander our lead forever. Agreed. I have several (very smart) coworkers in other countries. And our political system is an atrocious thing to watch these days. Whatever happened to compromise? I don't think anybody really knows for sure what the future holds. The thing is with cloud computing and with the spread of technology into the developing world they will likely be needing engineers too. Of course that may not happen if the software world is so carved up that all of the business goes to a handful of companies that are employing a fixed number of people and concentrating the gains. And if Elon Musk has a breakthrough with neuralink, then maybe we'll all be out of a job. Why write code when you can think print('hello world')? On the other hand, big players can get disrupted, technology can change, and its not like every human being has the capacity/stomach for the abstract problem solving we do day to day.
abstatic 7y ago
Thanks for taking out the time to share this. Really made my day! DO has one of the best content releated to programming. Keep it up!

ivankolev 7y ago

Almost the same path for me, DO hits the sweetspot for me in terms of features, and the new offerings are looking very pragmatic and thought-out. Thanks DO, I am defunitely increasing my spend on your product!

quickthrower2 7y ago

Yeah the way I see digital ocean (from when I first saw it years ago) is you can get professional cloud computing with quick spin ups etc. at a reasonable price. The basic stuff you need - a VM which you can run whatever you want on. I am hosting a side project on a $5 droplet it and sometimes I forget I use Digital Ocean (which is a good thing :-). Just bash command to install NodeJS etc. and a single VM but the uptime has been incredible.