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Granted I'm new to devops, only been on a platform team for about 9 months now, but I still feel incredibly dumb every time I try to work with it. That being s
by danielvaughn 3y ago
Granted I'm new to devops, only been on a platform team for about 9 months now, but I still feel incredibly dumb every time I try to work with it.
That being said, we're also layering a bunch of stuff on top - helm, nginx, GKE, terraform, as well as a mountain of other things, and then to top it off we have a bunch of shell scripts doing random things to help tie it all together.
Normally I can pick things up pretty quickly. I just built a parser with tree-sitter, despite knowing virtually nothing about language design. Didn't take very long.
But the modern devops stack is a learning curve like I've never seen before. It's taking me more energy to learn it than it did for me to learn programming itself. Then again, maybe I'm just getting old.
- cjaro 3y agoI appreciate your shared experience as I have a rather similar one. I've been on a platform SRE team for about eight months myself, with seven years of SWE experience before that, and feel as though I'm just able keep my head above water. It's one thing to learn about k8s, the cloud, terraform, etc, then quite another to pile it all together, particularly since it all becomes heavily customized. It's a different job than code-writing software engineering, that's for sure. To me, it feels less like there's a 'stack' so much as there's a word cloud of DevOps buzzwords to start throwing at problems. Even when directed by architects & principals, it overwhelms. I resonate with feeling incredibly dumb whenever I pick up a new ticket from our backlog. It feels like gaining deep knowledge of these systems will be a nearly insurmountable challenge. It's been eight months, and while I know far, far more than I did on day one, I feel that every day is a day one of sorts.