Trading in my IT hat for DevOps

My professional career started with a brief stint as Quality Assurance before I made a quick turn into Information Technology. Ever since I’ve stayed the path of considering myself a “tried and true IT guy” and all things that came with IT Management. However even in those early days, there was a small but growing portion of my job that I enjoyed but was never able to fully focus on… until now. That portion is what used to be called “Sysadmin” or even “TechOps” but now goes by the fancy term “DevOps”. Yes, going forward I’m now full time DevOps… and I couldn’t be more excited.

Long time followers of Obviate.io (formerly Snowulf) may have noticed that over the last 12 years of this blog, I’ve been just as likely to write about servers and writing code as I have been about fixing/reviewing computers. There are just as many blog entries that mention “Apache” (though these days I favor Nginx) as mention “USB”. So it’s safe to say that I’ve been working on server related projects for quite some time. I can even honestly say I’ve been largely (or solely) responsible for customer facing production web sites at 4 of my 5 employers.

So why the change? It’s hard to call it a “switch” or a “change”. Really it’s simply the opportunity to focus. My current employer is experiencing growth and management decided it was time to have both full time IT and full time DevOps (where as before I was both). Fortunately I was allowed the opportunity to dive fully into the DevOps world (effective today) after spending the last few weeks training my IT replacement.

So no, I cannot fix your computer anymore. I’m terribly sorry but there is someone better qualified for that. However I will happily look after the feed and caring of your server pets. Though I must mention I have some plans on taking those server pets of yours and turning them into Kubernetes cattle. But that’s a talk for another time…