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# The journey from developer to devops - what i've learnt along the way

True DevOps culture goes far beyond Kubernetes. Learn how predictive monitoring, blameless reviews, and clear communication can slash your build times from two hours to ten minutes.

- **Speakers:** Liam Hurrel, Alireza Chegini
- **Event:** World Congress 2021
- **Published:** July 29, 2021
- **Duration:** 42:44
- **URL:** https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/238-the-journey-from-developer-to-devops-what-i-ve-learnt-along-the-way

## Summary

The evolution of software engineering from isolated, Waterfall-based development to cross-functional DevOps environments highlights the necessity of breaking down silos between developers and infrastructure teams. Early deployment methods often suffered from a lack of real-time visibility, relying on end-user complaints to identify systemic failures. By adopting modern DevOps practices, engineering organizations can eliminate the blind spots of legacy release cycles, shifting the focus toward speed, reliability, and continuous customer value.

Migrating legacy banking systems to the public cloud demonstrates how critical time-to-value is when selecting observability tooling. Integrating application performance monitoring (APM) and infrastructure observability natively during an Azure migration provides crucial telemetry data without extensive configuration delays. Furthermore, modernizing continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines can drastically accelerate team agility. For example, dismantling monolithic legacy CI/CD pipelines and provisioning customized, high-memory cloud servers can reduce application build times from nearly two hours to just ten minutes, easily justifying the infrastructure cost through massive productivity gains.

Developing a mature DevOps culture goes far beyond specific tools like Kubernetes or complex scripting. Highly effective organizations prioritize predictive over reactive monitoring by granting developers direct, read-only access to production environment metrics, allowing them to spot anomalies before they impact users. This transparency must be paired with blameless code reviews that critique the logic rather than the engineer, fostering a collaborative ecosystem. Ultimately, the most heavily demanded yet underrepresented skill in modern platform engineering is communication—the ability to act as a clear translator between software engineers, testing teams, clients, and executive management.

**Keywords:** devops culture transformation, waterfall to agile migration, legacy system cloud deployment, azure public cloud scaling, application performance monitoring, infrastructure observability capabilities, ci/cd pipeline optimization, legacy code build times, predictive software monitoring, blameless code review culture, cross-functional engineering communication, new relic APM integration, software development lifecycle, platform engineering skills, developer production access, cloud migration strategy

## Chapters

1. **Guiding enterprise financial teams through public cloud migrations** (00:00) — Coaching engineers on requirement analysis and initial architecture steps facilitates smoother transitions to public cloud environments.
1. **Discovering a passion for programming on early personal computers** (04:46) — Early exploration of basic programming environments sparks a lifelong interest in self-guided software development.
1. **Evolving through early developer roles and technology stacks** (07:54) — Bridging the gap between clients and engineers provides vital experience across foundational enterprise database architectures.
1. **Identifying the limitations of waterfall methodologies and physical deployments** (10:35) — Experiencing painfully slow manual releases and poor runtime visibility highlights the critical need for continuous integration.
1. **Breaking down organizational silos to define platform engineering culture** (17:57) — Removing the restrictive boundaries between software developers and hardware engineers restores structural agility to software delivery.
1. **Solving architectural challenges during rapid public cloud migrations** (24:38) — Accelerating legacy code builds and implementing application performance analytics decisively unblocks delayed production releases.
1. **Fostering developer awareness and data visibility in production** (32:40) — Providing developers with read-only access to live environments actively shifts engineering culture towards proactive problem solving.
1. **Prioritizing communication and structural awareness over strict tool mastery** (38:25) — Exceptional interpersonal abilities and a holistic understanding of the software lifecycle strongly differentiate leading platform engineers.

## Related Moments

- [Transitioning from software engineering into a DevOps trajectory](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/547-how-to-gitops-your-cluster-with-flux) (from "How to GitOps your cluster with Flux")
- [Overcoming cultural friction and scaling DevOps team practices](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/855-fast-flow-not-fast-fluff-embracing-an-eclectic-devops-coaching-approach) (from "Fast Flow, Not Fast Fluff: Embracing an Eclectic DevOps Coaching Approach")
- [Evolution from waterfall to agile and DevOps](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/36-devsecops-security-in-devops) (from "DevSecOps: Security in DevOps")
- [Shifting to a DevOps career from non-technical backgrounds](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/545-my-journey-into-devops-world-how-it-all-started) (from "My journey into DevOps world - How it all started!")
- [Origins of adopting DevOps and overcoming infrastructure bottlenecks](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/338-demystifying-devops-pros-cons-dos-don-ts) (from "Demystifying DevOps—Pros, cons, dos & don'ts")
- [Evolution of software delivery and the devops pipeline](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/853-navigating-the-ai-wave-in-devops) (from "Navigating the AI Wave in DevOps")

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