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

What if you could slash your CI/CD pipeline from two hours to just ten minutes? Learn the DevOps practices that make this dramatic improvement possible.

#1about 3 minutes

A 20-year journey from developer to DevOps coach

A career path spanning two decades from software development to specializing in DevOps, cloud migration, and coaching teams in the financial sector.

#2about 3 minutes

Discovering a passion for programming with Commodore 64

The journey began with playing games on a Commodore 64 and evolved into writing the first application using Quick Basic to solve a real-world problem.

#3about 3 minutes

Early career as a developer and tech stack evolution

Starting in customer support provided direct client feedback, while technical skills evolved from Visual Basic to C# and ASP.NET with a constant focus on SQL Server.

#4about 3 minutes

Shifting from waterfall development to agile practices

Early experiences with the waterfall model's failures led to adopting an agile-like approach focused on customer feedback and iterative value delivery.

#5about 4 minutes

The challenges of manual deployments without monitoring

Deploying software via physical media like CDs highlighted the critical need for observability, as there was no way to understand application behavior post-deployment.

#6about 6 minutes

Defining DevOps by breaking down historical silos

DevOps emerged to solve the friction between siloed development and operations teams, enabling faster delivery of value to the customer by fostering collaboration.

#7about 8 minutes

Solving practical DevOps challenges with strategic tooling

Two real-world examples show how choosing an easy-to-implement monitoring tool and optimizing a legacy CI pipeline dramatically improved delivery speed and visibility.

#8about 6 minutes

Key focus areas for improving your DevOps practices

Improve DevOps culture by increasing developer awareness of production, fostering constructive collaboration, leveraging data from monitoring, and choosing tools with clear goals.

#9about 4 minutes

The most in-demand and least-offered DevOps skills

Beyond technical tooling, the most valuable and often missing DevOps skills are communication, a holistic understanding of software engineering, and stakeholder management.