How do I pivot more towards DevOps career-wise?
Hi experts,
I had a few years of experience as a BI developer (ETL + Dashboarding mostly) and moved into a new job 9 months ago which is sort of BI-Ops.
I dabbled into three focuses:
- ETL: Mostly Python + Airflow + BigQuery
- Internal Doc site: Think a static site generator running on Google Cloud Run with GitHub Action as CICD
- BI workflow: Think a large BI team that needs a proper git workflow + a lot of GitHub Actions for linting/automatic approving/etc.
I actually led all three projects but the reason I said "dabbled" is because either the project got shelved or I only got to complete a PoC and then it was good enough so nothing complicated (read: good for resume) was needed. After all all three are internal so there is no need to "scale" for production.
From project 2 and 3 I learned a lot about Cloud click ops and CICD stuffs including Terraform, docker and GitHub Actions. However I don't know how to go further down the DevOps road. I'll establish the reasons:
- My team actually is not supposed to do a lot of Ops, but we do it anyway because the company is ill structured
- As mentioned all Ops are internal so there is no need to scale
- We kind of use a lot of tools say Terraform but we never need to set them up. Someone else set it up for us (the real DevOps team I guess) and we simply plugin our code
How can I grow from here and pivot more towards DevOps? I'm missing a lot of skills, e.g. as mentioned I actually don't know how to setup things. Neither do I do any real Dev (Dev in our team simply means writing ETL code in Python and SQL, which I'm already good at). I guess I can learn some of the skills by setting up a home lab (I do have a 32GB server so surely I can learn basic K8S) but is that going to be enough for resume? TBH I don't really have need of those things for myself (at home I mostly dabble with system programming, either low level C or quick Python), so the best I can learn is going to be superficial.
Or maybe I should find a way to move to the DevOps team? It's a bit tricky because the whole team is in another time zone and the company seems to prefer to dismantle and outsource it, so I might need to actually leave and join a new company - and again here comes the uncertainty - is my resume good enough?
What do you think? Thanks in advance.
Posted Nov 4, 2022, 1:29 AM UTC