Kevin recognized a rising demand for DevOps expertise and understood the necessity for a deeper understanding of DevOps in his software engineering career. The TechWorld with Nana DevOps bootcamp played a pivotal role for him, in acquiring these crucial skills and advancing to the senior engineer level.
Read his inspiring journey and how you can follow in his footsteps to ensure your success too 👣 🎯
Kevin is one of our successful DevOps Bootcamp graduates 💙
Meet Kevin 👋
Hi, my name is Kevin, and I come from Austria 🇦🇹
As a software developer, I realized that mastering DevOps was essential for advancing in my career. With growing DevOps responsibilities in my role, I knew I needed more than just on-the-job learning.
That’s why I chose TechWorld with Nana’s DevOps Bootcamp. In this blog, I’ll walk you through my journey, how the structured learning helped me upskill and prepared me for more senior-level challenges at work 😊
What is your current role at the company you work at? 👨🏻💻
I work as a software developer at an IT-company, providing software solutions to small- and medium-sized enterprises in Austria.
My focus is on the backend, but I have good insight into the frontend as well.
In my team I am mainly responsible for the backend development, and as part of that I actually receive more and more DevOps tasks.
Why did you decide to learn DevOps as a software engineer? 🤔
While my company was building a DevOps-team we were lacking DevOps expertise in our project team, and so sometimes we had bottlenecks during vacation times or sick leaves. I'm one of the engineers, who then wanted to take over some tasks or help fixing urgent bugs in our deployed services.
"And so there was a lot of trial-and-error on my side, trying to fix problems and understand things by googling, while my DevOps colleague was gone. It’s a painful way of working" 🙇🏻♂️
I knew sooner or later I would need to learn DevOps technologies properly from the ground up to feel confident when doing such tasks 💪
Side Note from TWN Team -
Who does DevOps?
DevOps concept and DevOps Engineer Role are understood very differently from company to company.
Some companies do have their own DevOps engineer(s). In some companies there is no such separate role, but DevOps tasks are split between software development and operations team, like software developers are setting up the CI/CD pipeline, operations is responsible for the cloud infrastructure etc.
That’s also why DevOps is relevant for so many different IT roles.
Also I wanted to proactively do a DevOps training to upskill and reach my next career level as a mid-level software developer 🚀
How and why did you decide to take the TWN DevOps Bootcamp over other courses?
I actually researched a lot. I was looking for a complete program that is really comprehensive, structured over multiple months, instead of taking multiple separate courses, where the prerequisites are not clear and where you don’t get the big picture.
I had then heard about TechWorld with Nana from a previous project. So I downloaded the curriculum and demo projects of the DevOps Bootcamp. I could see that the modules are based on each other, which was very important to me.
Comparing Nana’s intense and interconnected program with different isolated courses out there, it was an easy decision for me. There were not really alternatives that were comparable to the scope of the bootcamp, where you learn the complete profession as a whole.
Still I also asked my colleagues at work for their opinion including a DevOps engineer 🤔 They all supported my decision, so I enrolled with confidence.
I kicked off my new year by enrolling in TechWorld with Nana’s DevOps Bootcamp on January 1st!
"The DevOps Bootcamp is definitely intense. But it’s the only DevOps training I found that has a clear structure and interconnects all subtopics and technologies into one big picture."
How did you structure your learning, how long did it take you to complete the Bootcamp? ⏰
I was lucky enough to do the bootcamp full-time, taking a 6 months break from my work and fully dedicate my time to upskill myself 🤝
My plan was to do the DevOps Bootcamp and Nana’s CKA Course within that time, ending with the CKA exam.
It was supported by my employer. I guess they also benefit from having more employees, who are able to build DevOps processes. So it was a perfect win-win situation :)
Regarding structuring my learning:
At the beginning of my learning, I created a custom learning schedule, as I wanted to complete the bootcamp in 4 months instead of 6.
With the learning schedule I knew approximately how much progress I needed to make each week.
Sometimes it took longer, sometimes I was faster, still having this roadmap helped me to stay on track 👍
How was your learning experience? What did you like the most about the DevOps training?
I would say these two characteristics stood out the most:
1) Structure:
I really liked the structure of the program. It’s super clear, and the sequence of the chapters makes absolute sense. I'm a Linux user, still I liked that it started with Linux to learn and refresh some OS concepts, how to use the shell, shell scripting etc. Some very important concepts, every engineer should know.
2) Mix of Theory and Practice:
The mix of theory and practical parts were perfect: Only theory would be boring and only blindly typing along or copy-pasting code without understanding the concepts behind or understanding the why’s would also be bad.
Each module started with theory and then immediately we dived into applying the learnt concepts with hands-on projects. On the other hand, during the demos, Nana explained every piece of code, so you were not left with any knowledge gaps. I liked that a lot compared to other courses.
Also in general I liked that there were tons of hands-on projects and the size of the labs were just right, not too big, not too small.
In addition, I think it’s good that project work is mandatory throughout the Bootcamp. Not just passively listening to the videos, but actively developing your own projects in GitHub. I knew that if I wanted to get certified and get my digital DevOps Practitioner badge at the end, I would have to work for it from day one!
Your 6-month learning break just has ended, excited to get back to work? 🤓
Absolutely, I’m happy and proud that I took the initiative to advance my skills, and now feel more confident as an engineer. I’m fully prepared to take over DevOps tasks!
Will this DevOps training have an impact on your career? 💪
In our company, the compensation system is very transparent.
We have three seniority levels, which are:
👶 Junior
👨🏻💻 Intermediate
🥷 Senior
Currently I’m intermediate. Being able to implement DevOps processes as a software engineer is definitely something that differentiates a mid-level from a senior-level engineer.
So by graduating as a Certified DevOps Practitioner, I’m sure I took a big step towards senior. 😊
While this usually comes with a salary increase, it’s not what I strived for in the first place. I learnt DevOps for the sake of being able to take over DevOps tasks.
I think in IT, it’s important to stay ahead of developments in the industry to not get left behind. It’s a fact that DevOps is adopted by companies and thus the know-how is needed more and more as a software developer.
In my opinion to stay relevant and valuable as an engineer, you need to go beyond your comfort zone and continuously upskill 🤠
What do you recommend to new DevOps-aspirants? 💡
Stay super-focused! Don’t confuse this online Bootcamp with a simple course. The Bootcamp is not a training you do casually “on the side” 🫡
This is really about YOU, so make yourself important and dedicate your time and attention to learning! 🤓
Here’s what I did to ensure I would learn the most and not lose focus:
I made a plan of how many lessons I had to do every day in order to complete the program within 4 months. I wanted the most intense learning experience possible.
Very importantly: Be consistent and create a Github profile right from the beginning ✅
Feel free to share anything else in addition 🙌
I know that I am now fully prepared for my new tasks after completing the DevOps Bootcamp. And I know other students will feel the same after taking this program from TechWorld with Nana 😊
Good luck to everyone on your DevOps journey!
Do YOU want to upskill in DevOps or Cloud?
Did you find Kevin's story inspiring and motivating? If you too, want to level up your skills as a software engineer with tremendous career opportunities, that's exactly what we do best. We've already helped 1,000s of developers on this journey with our Bootcamps! 🤗
And we can help you go from absolutely zero DevOps knowledge to becoming a senior engineer, who is proficient in DevOps within just few months, with our meticulously structured, fully up-to-date DevOps Bootcamp 🚀
Before starting with the DevOps bootcamp, you can even book a FREE orientation call, where we will guide you and help you plan your DevOps and Cloud career journey!