I will work at Dublin as a DevOps Engineer
Eventually. Since 2023 I started taking on DevOps tasks at my job. At that time, my company was pressuring developers to be not just frontend or backend, but fullstack devs. Ipso factum, I was already in a bad mood because I was working with Angular, which I hate. Now backend too? I even like it, but they use Java, and I don’t like Java. That’s why I looked into devops tasks. It was a way out of Angular and Java, and a way back to Linux ❤️. So beloved Linux, which I had stopped using because of the same company. Nowadays it is even possible, but 4 years ago it was quite hard to get the VPN working on any linux distro. Of course, I used WSL in windows, which is basically linux, but c’mon — is not the full experience.
So, I ended up enjoying it. Like, really. So much than I basically moved my role within the team to focus only on DevOps. And it worked pretty well. I learned k8s, jenkins, ansible, azure and other infra tools. Then I had to do something big. Change the infrastructure to microfrontends using Nx. And I did it. It was fun. But after that, some stuff was going through my project and I got the opportunity to move to another one. I work to this another, nowadays. The thing is, it’s a design system. When I joined, I was supposed to start as frontend but then transition back to devops. And It was literally what happened. I did some frontend tasks and after three months, I was full time DevOps again. Learned new things like AWS, Nginx, terraform. And after a year, the devops backlog was GONE. Not gone, but basically dead due to -unprioritised-task. Back to buttons.
And every time I thought to myself about going devops for real, I never look at it as an “I can do it”. Because I never worked with a dedicated devops team, or got real devops experience. I basically just fixed some problems that a developer or a project faces here and there. Is that devops engineering? Right, I did designed the infrastructure of that Angular monorepo microfrontend project, but part of the infrastructure was already made. I just adapted it. And yes I built some applications from scratch, planned migrations, fixed network access problems. Right but, do I have what is necessary to be a DevOps Engineer? Like, I don’t even know what they do.
Fucking tag. A few weeks ago I spent two hours trying to fix a vertical alignment of a tag component. I have five years of frontend experience. Is that right? A fucking label alignment? Ok, it wasn’t just an alignment, it has its complications, behaviors and conditions. But I got stressed with CSS. It was my trigger to realize that frontend, at least for me, is more horizontal knowledge than vertical. And after five years working, I think its not a good a idea to have a career built primarily from horizontal knowledge. So I decided to go full DevOps. Yes, all because of a tag.
The Dublin thing isn’t anything special. I visited there last month and like it. It has some advantages tho:
- Pay well
- Pubs
- Native English
- Close to Portugal, where my parents live.
- A lot of churches and, most important, daily latin mass.
The biggest problem with Dublin it’s the weather. I’m not a rainy or cloudy man, I love the sun. 100% sun. Sun is my diet. So part of the Dublin idea it’s also moving out from my comfort zone. Yes, I could go to Sweden or Russia to make that harder, but the idea it’s adapt myself and be happy in spite of it. I’m not trying to become an Übermensch or anything like David Goggins. Besides that, there are other problems. Dublin is waaay bigger and urban than Porto, my current city. And I don’t like big cities. The street rhythm is fast, there’s a lot of people (A LOT) and it’s hard to find tables in restaurants. But after spending a week there, I realized it’s possible to like it. Another problem is the rent price, the cigarettes price, the beers price and the prices in general. But I think a senior devops can handle it.
Another thing that makes me want this is the fact that I’ll be alone. Really, truly alone. Alone as I was when I first arrived in Portugal, and when I moved out from my parents’ house to study in another city years ago. The fresh feeling of living alone, not have much friends, focusing only on myself and enjoying everything I see because it’s everything new and different. I want that again.
So how can I do this? Well I don’t know exactly. I know I have like seven months to do it. I should build a devops roadmap, or buy a course, or at least talk to devops engineers. That’s actually a good idea, there must be a lot of seniors devops guys in my office. The only thing I did until now was booting linux to my home PC. I USE ARCH BTW. Finally I can say it again. Also, I’ve already decided to go full vim. Probably LazyVim. I tried Vim in 2021 but couldn’t get into it much. I didn’t think it was worth the struggle. But now I see that it can be fun, and sometimes we should do not-worthy things just because they’re fun.