Elevator Pitch
What can you do when the tools you need to develop can’t be installed in your company? Leave your dev coat, and dress yourself in ops clothes in order to find a solution. Add to that budget constraints and you get my journey from dev to ops to dev, which doesn’t make me a devops but a happy camper.
Description
In my daily job, I sometimes code mobile apps and most of the time help more serious mobile developers to have a nice development ecosystem.
So I’m a developer at heart. Seriously. Not an amazing one, but a passionate one, for sure.
Of course, I sometimes have to go to the dark side and issue a few commands, or think of a network topology… But that’s not my main job.
Two years ago, the team I work in got the need to setup an extension for mobile apps of our development forge. We could store our mobile apps code on the existing machines, but we had to think of a new way to build and test these apps.
Not an easy task when you’re a developer with no serious ops background.
To be able to talk with ops and devops, we had to learn Docker, gitlab, gitlab-ci. We then started to discuss our project, and were given the rights to build our own Docker images to be used in the forge.
Later on, we got our own machine, and we had to learn the rudiments of administrating a machine, then two, then four…
That did not make us ops nor devops, but we started to understand what this was about, and to get a feel for it.
We then faced budget constraints, network limitations, ops time constraints to help us… So we went full steam on our side and began to hack the organisation, the mandatory hardware and software…
We are now building distros by ourselves and using exotic hardware (even in the server room) with great pleasure. We’re even giving advice to integrate this hardware into other projects and sharing our processing power which lies in the server room.
We learned tons of things along the way, and this has been the best rabbit hole for me since ages.
We’re not devs anymore. We’re not ops. We’re not devops either.
I now am some kind of hybrid imposter. But a happy one.
Notes
This is mostly a feedback on my journey from dev to ops (which I am not).
There will be a few technical takeaways though.
I will talk about Docker, gitlab ci, ARM SoC, ARM distros, SBCs, MacPro, iOS, Android, ESXi and my experience with them.
I would be glad to share my feelings about this transition, and the joy I found in it.