I started my tech career about as close to the bottom as I've encountered in the industry. I took in computers at a service desk and wrote what the customer said was wrong with it - then handed it off for someone else to fix - and I collected payment when people were picking up systems. I'd been building and troubleshooting my own computers for about a decade at that point, so to say it felt menial is hilariously short of reality. I still did the job way above expectations, but when the opportunity came up to actually be able to work on the systems I jumped at it. This was also where I learned most effectively that little pieces of paper start important conversations.
No, not money, certifications, damn...
Since then, prior to DevOps/SRE work, I've:
But the big conversation starter is usually that for 15 months I worked in Kabul, Afghanistan as a DoD contractor. That's where I made the jump from help desk to Windows SysAdmin. Never underestimate a conversation starter in your career. Not just because of the social considerations in interviews, but because of the real experience you'll necessarily gain along the way.
I have worked in DevOps to some extent since 2012. I started as Operations on a DevOps team, where we explicitly did not call anyone a DevOps Engineer. We lost that battle but won the SRE war as an industry.
Since then I've been a Python developer with SRE duties, an IoT Security Researcher, a freelance DevOps consultant running my own business, a Sales Engineer for a DevOps consultancy, a Technical Account Manager at AWS where I advised several Fortune 100 companies’ DevOps/SRE teams on how to leverage AWS, and two roles as a Robotics Site Reliability Engineer, one of those as a team lead.
As of writing I’m now a Software Engineering Manager at Tally Digital Solutions, working with timeseries data, designing solutions, discovering cost- and time-savers, and doing my best to lead with emotional intelligence and candor.
If you’re interested in any of my work, feel free to check out my GitHub and GitLab. Clearly much of my work is done on private repositories, but I have some public examples of how long I’ve been working with certain technologies there.