DevOps

It’s not news anymore, but I thought it’d be worth mentioning real quick before I continue. I’m moving in the next couple months. In fact, as I write this, I have less than two months. The week of May 10th is when we’re slated to pack up our house and shift it south two states. That might not seem like a lot, but I’ve never lived outside of the Seattle area, let alone a thousand miles away.

With that in mind, I just wanted to reflect for a minute on my job hunting.

There’s one thing that will always be in the back of my mind no matter where I’m looking for a job: competition. The economy is either doing well or poorly, depending on which political side you stand, but that doesn’t affect the number of people looking for a job. I’m specifically talking about the number of people looking for a a tech job, in a tech hub known as the Bay Area.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a load of opportunities available, but there’s a trend with a lot of them: if you’re a college graduate who can program anything with your eyes closed, you’re hired. That’s what’s in nowadays. I’m not one of those people, and I’m ok with that. I don’t know if I’ll ever be a die-hard software developer. I like backends. I guess we can refer to that as DevOps, a term that until about 2010, was probably just made up mumbo jumbo.

DevOps is a blend of software development and behind-the-scenes operations stuff. Think about the guys who make the internal tools in your company that allow you to do what you do. Those are DevOps guys. If you’re a software developer, think about the guys that made all the tools you use to validate, build, and test. In some shops, those are done in house… by the DevOps guys.

DevOps is a field that’s quite popular. You don’t have to be a wizard in a given language, but you need to know your stuff. There’s a lot of thinking on your feet and new challenges will always arise.

This is where I want to be. I have a really great idea in my mind on a platform that gives you the power of DevOps without needing a ton of staff and man hours to make your backend needs happen.

I hope to have something launched in the next five years. That’d be really exciting for me.