This year has been pretty intense in terms of learning, from moving countries to getting used to a new way of working with (almost) the same tools.
Join me in my 2022 journey, when I discovered you do not have to dive into some new technology to keep on learning.
Jan-Feb-March
2022 started pretty high for me, I was living in Kraków, spent the holidays in Argentina and had the good news that the Kubernetes migration I worked on last year shipped successfully to Production. I was ready for the next adventure!
I am a person who really enjoys what I do professionally, and I feel privileged for that. I like it so much that I got a Big Tech Company round of interviews on my birthday (March) - those 5 in one day types of interviews. It felt pretty awesome, this is a company I am very curious about and want to work there someday. I got an offer from them, but I decided to decline in favour of moving to Amsterdam.
Apr-May-Jun
So I started to look for an Amsterdam based job, I participated in some interview processes and finally decided to join Quin. The offer was excellent, the people I met were super kind and professional, and the product/industry was new and attractive to me; so everything went perfectly.
We moved in June with my family; it was a bit stressful at the beginning, naturally expected in such situations, with all the coordination, paperwork, flights, housing, etc. Fortunately, we had help from a group of fantastic professionals.
Jul-Aug-Sept
These were the highest learning months, a lot to take in, first three months in a new job. People to know, teams to get familiar with, the new product and the Infrastructure behind all that.
I know it can be difficult to keep up and sometimes it becomes a stressful situation. If you feel it is too much, please relax for a bit. Take a walk, go grab a tea. Nobody (should) expects you to be 100% productive in your first months.
The most challenging for me was getting used to the new approach to handling application deployments, specifically with ArgoCD. I never worked with it but it is a platform to manage Kubernetes deployments, among many other capabilities.
I was used to handling all deployments using Helm (Helmfile) with no other additional orchestrator. But ArgoCD offers an abstraction layer on top of Kubernetes and it structures declarative deployments and k8s resources, along with application lifecycles, resource pruning and a set of deployment policies to pick from. This gives a wide range of possibilities for you to adopt, depending on your use case.
If you want to know more, please check out ArgoCD documentation.
Along with that, I learned a new way of managing Terraform modules in a structured way. I plan to write about that as well!
I was also able to add value to the product by implementing security best practices for Kubernetes in AWS. That first contribution always feels awesome, it is like giving back a bit of the trust the company put in you.
I wrote my first blog post on IRSA. Check it out!
Oct-Nov-Dec
I always had the curiosity to share content about what I do, mostly because I enjoy helping people, and I have been googling and reading a lot (as we all do) to solve stuff or implement fixes on my daily job. So, why not giving back?
I got this idea from my current Manager - the importance of having people around you that pushes you forward, and more so if they are people in charge. I found Hashnode while googling about IRSA, so I decided to create an account and started getting familiar with it.
I gathered a list of topics that I specifically worked on in the past, and things I wanted to share. I read a lot of advice from content creators in Hashnode, which is a really good starting point; I think one of the huge advantages of being on IT is the number of resources, information and people willing to help.
And finally started to write blog posts. It is a pretty good feeling to be able to share experiences with fellow people and more with someone with no contact with technology.
I started my website as well. I was looking to create one as a presentation way of what I do, who I am and how to contact me.
This is my blog post about creating a site with Hugo & Blowfish on Gitlab Pages, check it out!
I also started a Udemy course in GO that I recommend. It is very well explained for beginners (in GO) like myself, and there are a lot of exercises and projects to go through.
What's next?
I would like to explore public speaking. There is a lot of good advice and many people share their experiences with it, so I think I will start writing about topics I want to talk about and getting reviews from my peers. I think I can get a grasp of how my confidence level before committing and starting practising with my family 😁.
I would also like to get Certifications in AWS and GCP.
Keep on learning GO.
Start mentoring people willing to learn or start in Cloud Engineering. I have created a profile in CodingCoach. If you are interested in talking about Infrastructure for free, please have a look!
Conclusion
I am happy someone suggested blogging, it was something I did internally with documentation and presentations, but never publishing. It feels scary at first, but I am getting used to being out there.
Even though technology could not change from changing jobs, there are plenty of learning opportunities. From a new approach, a new way of managing secrets, a different authorisation method, or even a new way of peer review. There might always be an opportunity to learn stuff you already know.
I am always open to discussing and talking about technology, Cloud, football or even living abroad.
Thank you for reading. Reach out, I would love to help in your Cloud journey!
