Hello Community!

Yeah, That's Me.

Im a technical person who has experience in field of Software Development. I'm a Software Developer, DevOps Engineer. It's my first time posting in this forum.

I'm sharing my story because I hope to inspire a novice in the field.

I started as a Marketing Staff in a technical school. I was earning $4 to $8 a day. After a year, I was assigned to teaching. I became an IT Instructor.

I taught Web Programming and Computer Hardware Servicing. I specialized into coding. I taught my students Object-Oriented Programming. We started with Java Programming so my students could easily understand OOP.

My resources came from Stanford University. Some videos of professors talked about programming and that was the time I met Karel. Karel is a Programming Language using Java. The e-books and other IDEs such as Eclipse are also available online.

Now, They have an online IDE for Karel.

For two years, I felt emptiness and a lack of challenges in life. I didn't have good benefits from the company since it was a charitable foundation. I only earned $100 to $150 per month. I used to compare myself to my friends who worked at a Fast-food Restaurants. They make more money than me. I thought that the meme I am programmer, I have no life was real. I eventually left the company and moved somewhere else.

I shifted my career from IT Instructor to Technical Support Representative. I never wanted to waste the studies and experiences I had related to programming. That was why I quit my job and looked for a Software Development company.

One day, I browsed some job-search platforms. My priority was the company near my place. I found a company nearby. It is only 1.6 KM or 20 minutes walk away from my home. My tech stack at that time was CodeIgniter using HMVC pattern with Bootstrap for the UI. That was the only experience I have and luckily I got hired since they were looking for a PHP programmer. I passed the interview and answered all the questions from the Head of Engineering.

That was the start of my career being a real software developer. I started there as a Web Developer and after a few months, I used to be a flexible team player.

In my first three months, I learned REST API using Yii2 Framework. After a few months, I was designated as an iOS Mobile App Developer. It took almost a year to be a mobile app developer. I enjoyed developing an iOS app using Xamarin, Swift3, and Objective-C. I loved using UIKits the way of designing apps programatically with constraints.

There was a time when my boss gave me some side hustles. I took it and worked there as a Web Developer and iOS Mobile App Developer at the same time.

I became a Jack of all trades, master of none. I learned different skills and tools. I participated in many fields and also share some ideas with my colleagues.

Since also they need to deploy some projects on the Linux cloud -- my boss asked me if I can handle it. I was later assigned to Linux cloud projects. That was the time I got to work on their Cloud Servers as well. I began working with cloud Light-Tier (Cloud Service Providers). They were using Light-Tier such as DigitalOcean, Vultr & Linode.

After a year, I worked on several of their large projects such as Chat Messaging App and Video Conference. I once worked there as an iOS Mobile App Developer / Backend Developer. Unfortunately, our Cloud Administrator left the company and went AWOL. My boss tried to take over all the tasks left behind. It was hard to take over all of it and they need a person who has the knowledge and skills to handle it. It was difficult to take over all of the tasks. Many of the tasks were assigned to me because of my experience. That was the time I was promoted and took over it.

I was promoted to Cloud Administrator with a minor role of BE Engineer. I managed their Top Tier CSP. They were using Amazon Web Services as their Cloud.

I became comfortable with what I'm doing in the past few months. I started to love exploring Cloud Technologies. I worked even late nights and even weekends.

Over the past years, I heard about the DevOps Engineer role. It was very popular. I looked at its job descriptions. It was the same as what I am doing. It is convenient for me and also for the company. It was more about helping the company to deliver fast and become more productive.

Last year, I used 6-month Rule to learn what is DevOps. I learned the main concept of it. I learned Docker. I learned (CI/CD) Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery / Continuous Deployment using a Drone, Implemented some Bitbucket Pipelines and GitHub Pipelines. I used AWS Elastic Container Service and Elastic Container Registry with Codebase Webhooks over EC2. I learned IaC using Terraform, I automated a lot in my recent projects. I explored more about Chaos Programming. I read books about Security, DevOps, and System Designing.

Recently, in the 1st Quarter of this year, I was thinking that there were good results from the past couple of months. I applied to another company for a DevOps Engineer Position. After a few days of Job Hunting, I luckily get passed!

Now, I'm working as a DevOps Engineer. I still love what I'm doing and still learning every day. Let's just compare my current rate vs my old rate. It is from $4-$8 per day to $4-$8 per hour.

I hope this post encourages someone. Next time, I'm gonna post some Docs about my learnings.

Thank you for your reading.