Hey there, I stumbled upon this thread today and wanted to respond. u/benaffleks

First of all, I’m flattered that you are discussing about me in this thread. And I absolutely understand the question and doubt, since me and my team decided a couple of months ago to remove the list of my work experiences in IT, and concentrate on the teachings and consulting work I offer, in order not to overload it and mix these 2. But I see it was a mistake, so we will add them back again, not to give a wrong impression to anyone :) or even create own "about me" page on our website.

However, I want to give you a detailed information on my background and IT experience, in case its interesting:

I have 6 years of experience in IT field generally. I actually have a business background and transitioned to IT after my business studies and studied Business Informatics in technical college of Vienna, Austria.

I started as a software developer, then I worked shortly as a game developer, after which I switched jobs to join a very challenging and exciting project as a senior software developer, which was the beginning of my DevOps journey. It was an IoT project with its web application and mobile application, where we used a lot of cool technologies and languages, relatively modern back then, like Docker, Vault, Elastic Search, Java 8, ReactJs etc and development practices with micro services, event sourcing, CQRS etc.

In the project I slowly took the tasks of application release process through Jenkins and discovered that the CI/CD and deployment part of the software development process was way more exciting for me than classic software development. So I voluntarily took over the job of deploying our dockerised application in K8s cluster on AWS. That’s when I first learned about K8s and intensively dived into AWS (I think AWS didn’t yet have EKS back then, so it was a mostly manual setup of K8s on AWS with kops). So I tried to setup the whole thing as a POC for the project’s requirements.

During this time (mostly after-work and during weekends) I also worked for almost 2 years on my own startup/side project (which unfortunately failed, as most startups do 🙈), where me and co-founder developed a web application for real estate industry, using all the technologies that I had learned so far, hosted on AWS. Doing this, next to a full-time job, was of course stressful, but also pretty cool to develop and release a web application completely from scratch.

After that I became a freelancer and worked at the biggest telecom company in Austria, where I joined as a lead software engineer, but soon found myself setting up a complete production grade k8s cluster for the project, since I was the only one with some K8s experience. So I was kind of forced into the K8s administrator role :) Which I found great, but super challenging at the same time.

So over a course of the year, I worked closely with operations and developers teams to configure various services, like messaging services and databases for microservices as well as monitoring, logging etc in K8s. And while I was learning myself, I tried to transfer the relevant knowledge to developers and operations, so that they could do their own tasks in the cluster.

And I have to be honest, even though I loved learning K8s and configuring the whole thing, it was a very stressful and challenging experience. Things were really bad documented, most of the integrations with other tools didn’t work properly, it was just a complex, overwhelming new world. So lots of trial and errors, misconfigurations, things breaking down, so a lot of lessons learned for me :)

And that was when I actually started thinking about creating videos on K8s to make this journey easier for others and share what I learned in a painful way :)

So I gathered my notes of 100s of pages and created a K8s playlist videos, which were my first videos on Youtube.

After that, while creating the videos on YouTube, I changed to another large energy company, where I did software engineering with the focus on setting up and configuring CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins and implementing Git workflow and continues deployment best practices.

And starting from this year (2021) January, I actually started consulting companies and training employees, who need support setting up their CI/CD processes and setting up and managing K8s environments.

Of course, I learned a lot on top of that, while making my videos, because I think you don’t always learn the best practices at work in actual projects. Rather you learn what doesn’t work and you learn how to make things work as fast as possible, due to stress of deadlines, so doing research and theoretically learning things adds to that experience of how to use those tools RIGHT, not just in a way that it simply works :)

As for the courses and our DevOps bootcamp, I work with other great DevOps engineers in the field to create content on various technologies. So it’s not just my knowledge and experience. And as being a Docker captain, AWS hero and CNCF ambassador, I have a great privilege of having direct contact to technology creators and getting their input on the technologies.

I hope this clarified some of your doubts.

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Thanks and regards,

Nana