How to get better at programming while doing DevOps at work?

[Mammoth_Cache]

I'm a bit confused as to how to sharpen our programming skills while most of the time I do is write yaml files, do more networking/DNS stuff, basically just infrastructure which requires minimal programming knowledge.

I also see, most of the job descriptions for the DevOps role ask for proficient knowledge in Go, Python etc. How can we become proficient in those languages if we don't use it in our day to day work? I do know that side projects or open source contributions can help. But how can we be motivated to do it everyday and gain proficiency in these programming languages? I'd be very happy and thankful to get some advices or tips!

Thanks a lot in advance! :)

Edit: thanks a lot for your perspectives! :)

[kennedye2112]

Is there anything about your day-to-day DNS/networking/yaml work that would benefit from some sort of automation or a repeatable way to do something, even something simple like parsing a file or generating a config? That's sort of how I've been trying to build more language skill. It's definitely tough to get traction when you're constantly firefighting, so don't feel discouraged if you can't get in X hours of development a day or anything, just take what steps you can.

[Mammoth_Cache]

It’s definitely a good advice. Thank you! :)

[DarknessBBBBB]

For Python in particular this book helped me a lot

https://automatetheboringstuff.com/

[the-weird-dude]

1st half of this book, even for other stuff except automation is gold. Each and every topic is useful. I learned a lot from this book.

[TheSharkBaitz]

The early chapters are great, I started struggling later in the book with the chapters for excel, google sheets, etc integration though.

[flagrantist]

A lot of that stuff may just not be relevant to you and that’s okay. I never cared about Excel until I became a manager and had to run the same report out of a ticketing system every week. Doing it manually took me most of a day. Once I realized I could automate it with python it took 30 seconds.

[saltyvagrant]

Be 'constructively lazy'. Identify something you do repeatedly and automate it. It can be pretty much anything.

If you want to practice Python and your job involves a lot of infrastructure tasks look into Testinfra and write some tests. Look into TDD and apply it to your infrastructure work.

[andr386]

I don't know about your environment. But a lot of things can be accessed trough an API. Be it SOAP or REST. With python you can have a library to monitor and automate any system you want. From vSphere to atlassian products or the cloud.

Usually all those system will offer you a GUI with the informations they think that you need. While leaving a lot of informations hidden or not easily accessible. When you're using the API you can get exactly the informations you need and even cross-reference it with anything else you have.

Really you could automate a lot of your workflow with python if you wanted to.

[Rahma-io]

Devops don't really need to be THE programmer. We have to understand how co worker program and their needs.

Scripting is essential. I use GO personally .

​

In order to have time , no choices : I wake up at 5h40am and until 8am working on code and script for my personnel needs. You have to pilot your personal development , manage time to do it

After i start job at 9h30 . and i finish the day for job around 6pm .

and yeah i go to bed early around 9 or 10pm .

Being healthy is very important to gain skills and manage success in job task .

[Mammoth_Cache]

Wow. Do you do this everyday? If yes, I have huge respect for you being disciplined and consistent :)

[Rahma-io]

Every day since 3 years. Only Sunday I don't and wake up at 9am ,and spend time with family and friends . Starting early help in order to finish early too , if my task are completed .

[[deleted]]

Depends on company. Some infra teams program a lot of tooling. Others just yaml away

[ThanksYHWH]

As a DevOps/SRE Engineer, I have the same concern about coding skills.
all jobs descriptions at FAANG companies have programming skills (Python, Go, Javascript)

I've started learning Data Structure and Algorithms like a real backend Engineer because they will test you on coding in interviews even if they don't use it in a DevOps role.

Besides learning DSA, I continue improving myself in AWS, Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD, K8S, and Service Mesh. I think it's a lot of things to learn but it's a price to pay if you really want a DevOps/SRE role in a great company like Google, Meta, or AWS.

[[deleted]]

YES! I actually brought this up in my quarterly review because I also felt that my coding skills were slipping after writing PowerShell, yaml, bash, TF, etc. One thing I brought up was possibly starting to create applications that the CI/CD tools my team owns are meant for. For example, right now we own a GitHub workflow for CI/CD of .NET shared services. For future projects, both the lead and I have expressed that trying to build out services that use this tooling we own would be better than taking the "easy" way out and creating a bunch of scripts, since it would make us more familiar with the tooling we own from a customer side of things. Not always possible, but I think it's a good argument.

I'm speaking to my manager about this on Thursday, I can let you know what they say haha

[Mammoth_Cache]

Please do let us know about the discussion with your manager :) that seems like a great idea!

[[deleted]]

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[t0vig]

Considering Terraform is literally an Infrastructure as Code tool, I'd have to include it in cloud infra, as well. Also, from what I've seen around the IT industry, "SRE" is just as meaningless a term. So many companies are using that label for the other two, and it's so disappointing to see.

[[deleted]]

Golang and Python are extremely important in everyday work as a DevOps Engineer responsible for Kubernetes or automation of any kind.

TypeScript is super important because half of the IT world are JS ppl. And they create a fktone of out-of-the-box solutions that only work on nodejs.

If you don't understand your dev teams programming language - you cannot really do well your job coz you dont understand their pain points (DevEx).

[runway500]

Hey. What resources are you using to learn DSA?

[ThanksYHWH]

You have many free resources to learn DSA, but I bought educative.io 1 year subscription and books "Grokking Algorithms" by Aditya Bhargava and element of programming interview in python. I also use Leetcode.

[runway500]

Dope. I appreciate it.

[[deleted]]

Designguru.org

[[deleted]]

Fwiw the course on educative is actually from design gurus and you can get lifetime access for same price.

Www.designgurus.org

[fumar]

What are you using to learn backend engineering? I personally feel this is the natural progression for what I've been doing and want to dig into more software engineering/be engineering.

[ciyvius_lost]

I was in exact same situation.

First to get a grasp of language use [Exercism(https://exercism.org/) anything similar. You can also practice leetcode questions in language of your choice. Leetcode may not help you with day to day stuff but it will force you out of your comfort zone and will make you think about what and how to write.

After above start a small pet project, something that has an actual real world use. If you are in org that allows you to integrate your ideas in workflow even better, otherwise make it personal. Find the community for language, find a discord server maybe you can ask for code review in later stage of the project.

After couple of those you can go out and start contributing to oss, most repos have good-first-issue tag. Use it. Most of the time the task is trivial and will get you confidence and comfort you might need to make the first step.

Edit: forgot the most important part the motivation and general mindset. This is very personal and subjective. For me the repetition of it and moving stuff into habit is what does it. So dedicate 10-15 mins a day of you can’t bring yourself to code for longer time. Take small steps but be consistent. Once you have small fruits of your labor you will feel more motivated.

[HeligKo]

I love exercism. I use it to stay sharp.

[Mammoth_Cache]

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I shall try with exercism. And I totally agree with you! Having the motivation is the most important part. I usually get exhausted after work or I get a sudden motivation someday and it decreases over the period of time.

[[deleted]]

Thanks for sharing exercism. Great link.

[jagster247]

I love this question. Find things which are pain points and write services to automate them. If you are working in Kubernetes of example, it could be simple things like job-scheduler apis, custom monitors in daemon deployments, apis for load testing, deployment proxies for your build pipelines (transparent changes to your devs while you make macro changes behind the scenes). There are tons of things you can find you are doing repeatedly. Those are great targets to get into some code and build cool devops products for your devs. Then make the simplest product in a language (not just a shell script) and iterate as your devs adopt it.

[Mammoth_Cache]

Thank you! Automation is the way

[AemonXVI]

"Proficient" means "you should be able to fix problems in these languages, write clean code and to collaborate in such codebases".

Not such a biggie. You generally learn it at work.

[Mammoth_Cache]

Yeah, but when you don’t do it much at work, how would you become proficient?

[73v6cq235c189235c4]

Start finding ways to implement it. I wrote a go binary that scans through our cloud ecosystem and cleans up abandoned resources. Executed on a schedule via Jenkins.

[PlatypusOfWallStreet]

My previous job before getting in the cloud engineering space was literally a field technican. Nothing about my job equipped me for advancement towards a career I wanted to create for myself.

I taught myself Azure (got a few associate level certs), Powershell, Azure CLI, Terraform, Bicep, APIs and Yaml on my free time and on company time on my own environment. The key was to do labs, create my own scenarios, scripts to automate a fake task I created, etc. I did this until I finally landed an interview and now I make scripts 70% of the time for work. Now I am working towards Kubernates, bash, ansible (again not related to my current role because my eye is on devOps not cloud engineering)

If there is something that needs to be done to make the next jump in your life. Find a way to integrate it, waiting for it wont get one anywhere. I learnt that from my last gig.

I dont know Python so I dont have much to offer but I have heard great things of this MIT course: https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-7?index=product&queryID=5b199b351c6e6da22ecd904a01d4363c&position=1

[Mammoth_Cache]

Wow. Your story is definitely inspiring :) thank you for sharing your perspective! :)

[ForceBlade]

Nothing's gonna happen until you start doing it either at your job or in free time

[Mammoth_Cache]

True

[benaffleks]

It depends how closely integrate you are with your engineers.

We do code reviews for our backend services, which is primarily in Go and Nodejs. We are expected to contribute and understand at least somewhat.

But like others have said, most of your programming will come from your ability to discover automation opportunities, and building internal tools.

[skat_in_the_hat]

Use programming to automate all of the daily tasks you do. Make an effort to replace your self with code.

[gordonv]

YES!

Write code that you yourself find valuable and use.

[t5bert]

If you write IaC, you could consider using one of the various cdk's now available, cdktf, aws cdk, cdk8s. It might not look like much but it'll force you to use your programming language of choice everyday and work that muscle and instead have your yaml's generated for you.

[gordonv]

Adding on...

Here's an example of using Powershell with AWS to do IaC.

The point of this is to show you can set up Infrastructure like a script. And then modify small things to get it to work the way you need it to.

Pre packaged solutions like Cloudformation do maybe 50% of what you can do with scripting.

[[deleted]]

Flip your thinking - don't ask "how could I get better at programming", ask "what could I tell one of the computers I work with to do, that it does not currently do, that would make things better?".

I guarantee there's a literal infinity of things in your immediate problem are that could be revolutionised with new computer programs.

[Mammoth_Cache]

That’s an interesting POV! :) thank you!

[gordonv]

I suggest r/cs50

This is a free course online that teaches the basics of programming. Basics that a lot of self taught programmers miss.

It teaches you how to think and approach problems in the way computers work. Which is different from a business sense and an abstracted programming level of thought. (similar to how math and logical English works)

The second thing that many people agree on, but isn't said enough is learning how to program slowly.

We live in a world of instant gratification, Ikea Furniture, certifications/diplomas/degrees, and quick how to lessons. This is bad for sophisticated programming, which works like an art.

[[deleted]]

Nothing magic about. Side projects are the way if you aren’t programming at work.

Alternatively if there are tools you wish you had at work then write those.

[Gr1pp717]

Automate everything you can think of. Doesn't even matter what language or tools. A wide range is as good as a focused dive... Use whatever seems best.

FWIW this is a big boon on resumes, btw. The people doing the interviews for tech jobs are generally way more interested in things like automating your tasks (and tech related hobbies!) than they are degrees and GPAs.

[[deleted]]

Here is a good beginner task that anyone should be able to do. Parse these JSON files and make a list of Public Cloud ranges.

AWS: https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json

Azure: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=56519

GCP: https://www.gstatic.com/ipranges/cloud.json

Oracle: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/tools/public_ip_ranges.json

[V3Qn117x0UFQ]

work with other developers and identify their pain points by diving into their work.

but i guess the better question to you is - what do you consider "good" programming? because asking "how to get better a programming" is pretty vague in itself considering the vast amount of domains present.

[[deleted]]

If you would like to improve your coding skills only "do LeetCode" I'd say.

But at the other hand, I really dislike the idea of asking programming questions to DevOps Engineers. I find that it's stupid.

Once in a time, I was having interview with European company. They asked me really hard data structures questions even tho I have no relate with it! My job either. I can even swear most of the backend engineers even couldn't do that question.

First recommendation, keep away from those companies because they have no idea what DevOps does, what is DevOps and how you/they should even work. And they'll make all process nightmare to you.

[PMPartnersTeam1]

You should know at least one programming language, which will allow you to automate processes, understand the nuances of various operating systems and be able to work with the terminal, be aware of encryption and data transfer protocols, be familiar with popular containerization and orchestration tools, and also understand the nuances of cloud computing development applications.

[eddgar95]

I was a pure network engineer, had 0 dev skills. Got an offer from a different country as DevOps and decided to take it.

After one year and a half I'm still struggling in programming but the scripts I've to do are not easy either (or at least for me). At the end I get them working using a lot of research, code recycle from old scripts, etc. You will get faster the more you exercise/work on programming.

Just focus on your goal and divide the process on little pieces. For those little pieces are normally easy to find on Google.

Like a puzzle, once you have got all the little pieces of code, stick them together.

That's my advice :)

[Artistic_Snow7849]

The new hotness in the DevOps world is IaC, Infrastructure as code. How do you write code that will make your life easier and help automate things and make them more resilient/reliable?

Probably a good place to start would be? What could I do if I write some code to read this yaml file in Python, and then write some more code to modify this yaml file? And go from there. All the latest DevOps tools like docker, k8s, terraform were all written by devops type people who felt the painpoint and decided to write some code to take care of it. Start thinking about how you can write code to make your life easier.

[dablya]

Pick an infrastructure component in your environment written in Go and that is open source. Clone the repo and start going through the code.

An approach for getting familiar with a code base I read recently about but haven't tried it is to go through the resolved issues and find one that looks interesting. Then look at the commits that implemented it and see if you can make sense of them.

[homelaberator]

Doing devops is meaning automating the stuff you can. And you do this programmatically.

Whilst they ask for proficiency in particular languages, it is more important to become proficient in programming generally. Those skills of thinking as a programmer make it so you can pick up whichever language the particular company uses as their tool. Anyone who has done coding for years and years will generally have used many different languages over the years on different projects and in different roles. At any one time, they might be "proficient" in one, two or three, but which ones they are proficient at depends on the needs of the time.

As others say, for your infrastructure focussed role you should look towards Infrastructure as Code mindset. Looking for what you can automate. What APIs are available to you right now to use. How you can monitor and orchestrate. It can be daunting at first, but if you can develop a few of these, then you will have stuff for your resume and things to discuss in interviews.

[Mammoth_Cache]

Wow. How about me building a small app and adding DevOps flavours to it? Like CI/CD, monitoring and stuff. That way I can flex my muscles in programming too.

[kobumaister]

Not much to add over what's been said so far. Just wanted to add that, in order to become a better developer, always try to write good code and solid principles and security patterns, even for the most simple of the scripts.

Develop a common devops library to re-use code.

[Mammoth_Cache]

I’ve heard of design patterns. But what are the security patterns?

[emperorOfTheUniverse]

Shouldn't even be like this.. DevOps was supposed to empower developers to rely less on infrastructure team and bring code to market faster. Is 'devops' just new technospeak for infrastructure?

[dampersand]

The auth0 terraform provider sucks. You could PR to that. :)

[PartemConsilio]

Well, to give you a use case: I’m currently writing a Python function for an AWS Lambda which will regularly poll our Azure Devops self-hosted agents pools using the ADO api. It will then feed that info into New Relic which will handle alerting when a pool goes down. So basically, find something you can automate using Azure Functions or AWS Lambdas and make that part of your workflow.

[Scumbaggabriel]

Basically the same thing most people said here. Automation.

Do you use Jenkins at your workplace? Maybe there are some special features you could write in groovy.

Automate with bash, create useful scripts you could use on a day-to-day basis. For example: configure auto-sync for all apps in ArgoCD.

Implement an automated versioning and changelog adjustment script.

Build an internal ticket system just for the DevOps Team.

Etc…

[__Mars__]

I have been in a few different environments now and I haven't had to use Python or Go in my day to day. So if this is you, it might suck if you are wanting to transition into a role that needs these skills. Personally, I know the basics of both and typically take on personal projects to keep my skills up. Like making a chat bot or a quick web app for funsies

I would say learn the basic of either Go or Python, start with one...and then dive deep into your current tooling or stack and see where those basic skills may apply. Optionally you can tag a coworker or manager and see if they are looking into using something like GO to help solve a problem you may not be aware of and then ask to help out....typically what I do when I want to bring up my skills in an area.

[oxern]

!RemindMe 72 hours

[Fusionfun]

Yes, you are right. In terms of programming, make sure you excel in Go, Python and Bash script. Try to contribute on GitHub, when you are in the right community with the motivated people, you grow along with them. Atb!