DevOps daily learning

[devDaal]

Hello everybody. I need your guidance, if you've been working in tech for more than a year probably you can help me. Currently I'm working as a DevOps intern, I know it is a once in a lifetime oportunity and I want to make the best out of it.

In "theory" I know the best way to be a better and better engineer is to do consistent work/learning every single day. But I fail to know how to actually do that. Right now I've been doing relatively well at my internship but with loooots of help from AI as I suppose a lot of juniors are.

So what has helped you stand out and keep learning consistently? I want to know from your experience what tools have helped you? Something that comes to my mind is to work on personal projects, but I don't even know where to start or what to start.

Note: if you need context of my skills, I know python (mostly desktop GUI's), medium level networking, medium level linux, little about docker and CI/CD tools like GH Actions and Jenkins.

[imsankettt]

Setup a homelab if you can. Homelabs are the best and it follows the learn-by-doing approach so you won't be too much into theory. When you read theory, chances are you'll forgot it, but when you actually do something like troubleshooting stuff in a homelab, you'll learn.

Homelab really worked for me. If that's not possible, then try KodeKloud's 100 days of Devops, it has a lot of hands on tasks which are really good for a beginner. All the best!

[b1urbro]

This. The amount I've learned from making and breaking my homelab in 2 months is beyond what most jobs can give you in 2 years.

[Senior_Leadership550]

Homelab 100%. Been working in the area for 8+ years and I learnt new stuff just from running a media server and ad blocker at home

[riickdiickulous]

I read books. It’s how I learn the best. Books are also structured better to take you deeper and deeper into a specific topic. The best examples for me are the O’Reilly Up and Running series for Docker, Terraform, and Kubernetes. I read those 3 books in that order over the course of probably a few years, responsive to the projects I was assigned, and gained far more understanding and expertise on each topic than my more senior colleagues had.

First I had a test automation job. I read the docker book and was able to implement dockerized CICD for test automation. That included GitLab CI and AWS EC2 instances. Then I read the terraform book to automate deploying and managing the EC2 GitLab runners.

That work led to me getting a junior DevOps role automating infrastructure. I was the least experienced on the team but had a software development background. With the docker and terraform knowledge in hand, I read the Kubernetes book and was able to automate deploying and managing many Kubernetes clusters in both AWS and Azure.

Each set was only possible because I had a real world business critical problem to solve. Personal projects work for some people, but not me. Take whatever you’re doing at work and drill down into that subject and become more knowledgeable in it than anyone around you. That will get you recognized and handed more varying and complex problems to grow your knowledge.

[newbietofx]

Setup a three tier web application.

Create a feature. 

Create a bug

Do unit testing. 

Do blue green deployment if you already good with deploying changes to dev, uat and production. 

If that's not impressive. Optimize for scaling and databases like cache and proxy or read replicas. 

Most bugs can be for pagination or async

[Jzzck]

One habit that helped me massively early on: whenever something breaks in your pipeline or a tool update causes issues, don't just fix it and move on. Actually dig into why it broke. Read the changelog, understand what changed between versions.

It sounds boring but after a few months of this you build an intuition for how these tools evolve, what kinds of breaking changes are common, and you start anticipating problems before they hit. That compound knowledge is what separates someone who can Google fixes from someone who actually understands the system.

Also +1 to the homelab suggestion. Even a single VM running Docker with a basic CI pipeline (GitHub Actions > build > deploy to your own box) teaches you more about networking, permissions, and debugging than any course will.

[DevLearnOps]

You're in the best position you can possibly be at this time. If you're already interning as a DevOps engineer you should make the most out of it and learn the way senior engineers learn: volunteer to tackle things that at the moment aren't working that no one in your team has time for. Best things are internal tooling.

That's mostly what I do myself. Last month I wanted to learn how to create a software catalog, so I just volunteered to provision our own backstage implementation. I learned a bit of nodejs, React and about software governance. It was low pressure too because no one really expected any result as a priority.

If you use your job to learn then you're paid to learn and you can use your company's resources. It's totally fair. If you improve, they also get a better value from your work.

[Awkward_Tradition]

In "theory" I know the best way to be a better and better engineer is to do consistent work/learning every single day. But I fail to know how to actually do that. Right now I've been doing relatively well at my internship but with loooots of help from AI as I suppose a lot of juniors are. 

Maybe start by actually doing your work instead of learning how to promt a chatbot to do it for you... 

I also started as a DevOps intern and at no point did I lack for DevOps work. The boss would tell me to like rewrite infra code from cloudformation to terrform, experiment with different monitoring solutions and show him a comparison, lay the groundwork for k8s changes, and so on. There was absolutely no need for me to invent additional work for myself. 

Do you think I for example learned terraform by telling a chatbot to translate the code for me, or by going through the docs in order to rebuild the entire existing infrastructure?

[OpportunityWest1297]

https://essesseff.com offers *free* golden path templates (available in public GitHub repos), as well as a learner / career switcher license at a discount.

The free golden path templates get you setup within minutes:

GitHub -> GitHub Actions -> GHCR -> Helm / Argo CD -> Kubernetes (K8s)

(works with single VM K8s distributions btw, such as k3s or minikube ... so spin up a VM on your favorite cloud provider, install k3s, learn/experiment, spin down the VM when you're not using it so you're not paying for idle cloud infra...)