# Dev Retro 2022: a Cloud Engineer perspective

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](https://quin.md/). 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.

![Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@philipmyr?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Philip Myrtorp</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/iiqpxCg2GD4?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a>   ](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1672307128438/50907fff-320f-44b9-9246-cbb573dbfb5f.jpeg align="center")

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](https://helmfile.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)) 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](https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/getting_started/).

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!](https://blog.mariano.cloud/irsa-in-eks-a-kubernetes-aws-bridge)

### 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](https://mariano.cloud/) 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](https://blog.mariano.cloud/your-website-in-minutes-gitlab-hugo-blowfish) 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](https://www.udemy.com/course/learn-go-the-complete-bootcamp-course-golang/) 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!](https://mentors.codingcoach.io/u/63ad5c864474770664cbfb18)
    

### 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!