About Me
Hi, my name is Nana.
Co-Founder of TechWorld with Nana
TWN is a leading DevOps and Cloud E-Learning Provider.
Over the last years, I've taught millions of people on how to become professional DevOps engineers through my DevOps Bootcamps, Youtube channel and online courses, as well as company trainings and workshops.
Nana Janashia
Background and Transition to IT
I actually have a business background and transitioned to IT after my business studies and studied Business Informatics in technical college of Vienna, Austria.
Start as a Software Developer
I started as a software developer, then I worked shortly as a game developer, after which I switched jobs to join a very challenging and exciting project as a senior software developer, which was the beginning of my DevOps journey.
It was an IoT project with its web application and mobile application, where we used a lot of cool technologies and languages, relatively modern back then, like Docker, Vault, Elastic Search, Java 8, ReactJs etc and development practices with micro services, event sourcing, CQRS etc.
Taking over DevOps Tasks and Personal Projects
In the project I slowly took the tasks of application release process through Jenkins and discovered that the CI/CD and deployment part of the software development process was way more exciting for me than classic software development. That was the start of my DevOps experience.
So I voluntarily took over the job of deploying our dockerised application in K8s cluster on AWS. That’s when I first learned about K8s and intensively dived into AWS (I think AWS didn’t yet have EKS back then, so it was a mostly manual setup of K8s on AWS with Kops). So I tried to setup the whole thing as a POC for the project’s requirements.
During this time (mostly after-work and during weekends) I also worked for almost 2 years on my own startup/side project (which unfortunately failed, as most startups do 🙈), where me and my co-founder developed a web application for real estate industry, using all the technologies that I had learned so far, hosted on AWS. Doing this, next to a full-time job, was of course stressful, but also pretty cool to develop and release a web application completely from scratch.
Kubernetes Administration as a Freelancer
After that I became a freelancer and worked at the biggest telecom company in Austria, where I joined as a lead software engineer, but soon found myself setting up a complete production grade K8s cluster for the project, since I was the only one with some K8s experience.
So I was kind of forced into the K8s administrator role :) Which I found great, but super challenging at the same time. This was a big part of my K8s and DevOps experience.
Consulting Beginnings
So over a course of the year, I worked closely with operations and developers teams to configure various services, like messaging services and databases for microservices as well as monitoring, logging etc in K8s.
And while I was learning myself, I tried to transfer the relevant knowledge to developers and operations, so that they could do their own tasks in the cluster.
The Beginning of TechWorld with Nana
And I have to be honest, even though I loved learning K8s and configuring the whole thing, it was a very stressful and challenging experience. Things were really bad documented, most of the integrations with other tools didn’t work properly, it was just a complex, overwhelming new world. So lots of trial and errors, misconfigurations, things breaking down, so a lot of lessons learned for me :)
And that was when I actually started thinking about creating videos on K8s to make this journey easier for others and share what I learned in a painful way :)
So I gathered my notes of 100s of pages and created a K8s playlist, which were my first videos on Youtube to share my DevOps experience.
DevOps Consulting
After that, while creating the videos on YouTube, I changed to another large energy company, where I did software engineering with the focus on setting up and configuring CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins and implementing Git workflow and continues deployment best practices.
And starting from January 2021, I actually started consulting companies and training employees, who need support setting up their CI/CD processes and setting up and managing K8s environments.