Hey everyone! I've been working in a junior DevOps position for about 9 months now. While the pay is great and the environment is stable, I'm feeling stuck due to the lack of mentorship and opportunities to experiment. I've taken the initiative to build my own Puppet lab using Dockerfiles and set up a NetBox for our company's VM inventory. However, I still find myself restrained by company policies, a black-box approach to CI/CD, and no experience with cloud technologies.
I'm not looking for hand-holding, but I'd love some solid advice on how to level up my skills and career. Here are a few specific areas I'm interested in:
• Self-Training: What home-lab setups, tools, projects, or challenges should I focus on to develop production-level skills?
• Pipeline Mastery: What resources or exercises can help me understand and take ownership of any CI/CD stack, moving away from the black-box experience?
• Career Acceleration: Beyond certifications and courses like Udemy, what distinguishes a "good" DevOps engineer from a "great" one in the near future?
I'd really appreciate your best advice—whether it's books, courses, hands-on labs, community challenges, or mindset changes—anything that helped you break out of a comfortable but stagnant role would be awesome. Thanks!
2 Answers
One key thing is to get proficient in a programming language. It really helps to have a solid grasp on things like Python since it's widely used in DevOps. You might also want to consider picking up JavaScript, as it can be beneficial too!
Try building and deploying your own app, maybe a simple CRUD application. Host it yourself using whichever cloud service you prefer. I've never been let down by a DevOps engineer who's working on their own side project; it shows initiative and gives practical experience!
Thanks for the tip! I'm pretty good with Python already, and I can see how JavaScript could add value. I'll definitely look into learning it.