I didn’t plan on becoming a DevOps engineer. No kid grows up dreaming about writing YAML files and chasing down memory leaks in the middle of the night. Like many of us in this field, I stumbled into it one broken server at a time.
I started as a junior developer at a small company where “DevOps” didn’t exist. We had one shared server, manual FTP deployments, and someone’s cousin had set up cron jobs that we were too scared to touch. When things broke, the developers were the first line of defense. That’s how I fell into infrastructure: not by ambition, but by necessity.
I learned the hard way through outages, corrupted backups, and deploys that took down the entire site. But I also learned fast. I started automating what I could. Wrote my first shell scripts. Discovered Ansible and moved us to CI/CD. Before long, I wasn’t writing much product code anymore. I was writing tools to help other people ship it. Fast-forward a few years, and now I’m managing a fully containerized environment in AWS. We use Terraform for infrastructure as code. We have autoscaling groups, failover plans, and an on-call rotation that actually respects human sleep. It’s not perfect, but it’s light-years from where I started.
Still, most days I’m invisible, and I’m okay with that.
DevOps is a quiet role. You’re not the one building flashy features or pitching to investors. You’re the one making sure the deploy doesn’t overwrite the database. You’re the one preventing downtime that never makes the news because it never happened.
What people see as “boring stability” is actually the result of countless choices, the right alert thresholds, the rollback plans, and the backups that work. That’s our craft. And while I don’t get applause, I do get peace. I take pride in clean logs. In pipelines that run without surprises. In servers that heal themselves.
It’s not glamorous. But it’s mine. I didn’t dream of being in DevOps. But now that I’m here, I can’t imagine doing anything else.