I started my career as a backend developer for a technical consultancy called Solirius Consulting. After a year of learning on the job, supplemented with dedicated learning in a supportive environment, I built up enough experience with Java, Python, and various DevOps tools, to call myself a competent software engineer. However, the most important things that I learned at Solirius are:
At Solirius, I worked on the digitalisation of the Ministry of Justice, which was a large-scale project, in which our microservice team provided utility APIs to approximately 10 other microservice teams. A centralised platform engineering team provided a platform for each microservice to deploy onto, and was following the industry-wide trend to host microservices on Kubernetes. Given a lot of freedom to select my own tasks, I chose to set up our Kubernetes manifests, and subsequently learnt my way around Kubernetes, Helm, Azure and Jenkins.
After learning more about DevOps, I realised that despite spending so much time with Kubernetes, I still didn’t feel like I had any ownership of what I had created. It was this, combined with the desire to become a Kubernetes god, that made me decide to leave Solirius, in pursuit of a career in DevOps.
In September 2019, I joined Transreport, a small startup working on an awesome product, Passenger Assist. Working with some amazing people in our London, Glasgow and Romanian offices, we have created a system that will help rail companies to provide assistance to disabled travellers throughout the UK.
Simply put, my responsibility is to make sure that the docker images I’m given run successfully, prioritising reliability, security, and scalability. I’m now also realising that a better understanding of coding will lead to a better proficiency in DevOps, so there might be some Ruby, Python, or other stuff in there too.