Getting Good at DevOps (Upcoming Talk)

Every year, I try to have some sort of professional goal or initiative. Some years have been spent learning a new language or framework, some years focused on education, sometimes soft skills, and other times learning a new tech skill.

Several years ago, I made it my goal to get good at DevOps 🚀

Most software engineers come out of school not knowing much about this at all. We learn computer science theory, maybe several languages, and tech fundamentals, but as far as practical deployment skills go? You hopefully get exposed to SSHing into a server and FTPing over files, but not much more. I’m not blaming school for this one either. Making everyone signup for AWS and drop $$$ on cloud spend is a hard sell.

Without having learned those skills in the classroom, you then enter the job market. Someone else does DevEx. Someone else does deployment pipelines. Someone else is the cloud expert. Someone else does security. …and so on…

The gap between “writing code” and “shipping code” quietly grows.

As a result, you may be an experienced developer without the skills to deploy the code you write. 😱

Sure, you can try side projects to upskill, but the allure of “Sign in with GitHub” solutions that magically handle deployments, previews, etc., is hard to pass up. Why reinvent the wheel when it just works?

I stumbled into closing that gap, not through intention, but through frustration.

I got tired of doing stuff the hard way. What do you do when the ✨ magic ✨ automatic deployments don’t quite do what you want? What do you do when maintaining a fun project turns into boring work? What do you do when it becomes your job to fix the cloud infrastructure?

The answer isn’t to quit. It is to learn.

Because I learned, in school when everyone else was FTPing their assignments, my team had a GitHub Actions DevOps pipeline. When my consulting clients needed a cloud architecture specialist who understood both the tech and how to actually make it happen, I was the one they called. When I had a personal project that required ongoing manual maintenance, I simply automated it.

There’s nothing magic about DevOps. 🧙‍♂️ Just like everything else, it is a skill. Sure, a skill that has to be learned, but it is a skill that you can learn, and that will pay dividends for your effort.

CodeStock 2026 4/10/25 at 1:45 pm in Knoxville, TN

I’m giving a talk in a few weeks about my journey: how a scratchy personal tool became something people rely on, and how automation makes sustainable open-source maintenance actually possible.

If you’re tired of building on localhost, stuck in a ClickOps land, or running out of motivation with your side projects, learning more about DevOps would be worth your time.

Would love to see you there:

CodeStock 2026 Schedule