42 tips for Getting Good at DevOps & Life 🚀👩🏻‍💻
Tags: programming, beginners, devops, docker
Published: 2022-03-10 13:02:44

Hi Folks,

This is Ankit from SigNoz! Sharing some tips I collected over the past few weeks talking to lots of people in DevOps 👋

Why 42 tips, you ask?
Because, it's the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.😎

Without any ado, let's get started 👇


## 1. Drink enough water 💧
First of all, you need to stay hydrated. Adult human bodies have up to 60% water, and water has many benefits. I am sure, someone would have told you by now. The important thing is to be conscious about it. Use an app or that cool measuring bottle to drink enough water every day.

<img width="100%" style="width:100%" src="https://media.giphy.com/media/4Z4S2tSxp0nYSJeQis/giphy.gif">


## 2. Get enough sleep 😴
You can’t be productive unless you feel fresh. We all understand the occasional sprints, or all-nighters where you want to build all data pipelines at once. But try to have a routine around your sleep time. Amongst its many health benefits, it will also make your feel more happy and less stressed out.

## 3. Learn to focus 🙇🏻‍♀️
The time that leads to mastery of a new technology is dependent on the intensity of your focus. So focus well. Use focus apps like [Forest](https://www.forestapp.cc/) or listen to meditative music if you need to. Keep exploring till you figure out what works for you to stay more focused. It’s one skill that you can’t avoid if you want to get better.


## 4. Take vacations 🏝
Social media is full of hustle culture. Don’t get carried away by that, you can take mindful vacations every now and then. It serves as a reminder that there is life outside code deployments and containers. And don’t be the only point of contact for all your app infrastructure. 😉

<img width="100%" style="width:100%" src="https://media.giphy.com/media/5ocAtoAPhIDcI/giphy.gif">


## 5. Find a mentor 👩🏻‍🏫
DevOps is always evolving at a fast rate. Yes, you can now access youtube videos giving you tips, but nothing can replace a mentor who has seen the journey firsthand. A simple trick is to look for people at positions where you would want to be a few years down the line. Also, don’t hesitate to reach out. Most people don’t mind helping out if asked the right way.

<img width="100%" style="width:100%" src="https://media.giphy.com/media/6ySFKd72MyV4Q/giphy.gif">

## 6. Keep learning 📚
This applies to most things we do in life. The key is to have beginner’s mindset and not shy away from getting our hands dirty. If there is a new tool or new technology out there which is gaining traction, don’t be afraid to learn it. You can make learning a process so that it does not seem that daunting.


## 7. Sign up for more than you think you’re capable of 💪
Sometimes we don’t know what we’re capable of. There might be more challenges at your workplace, or that job you think you shouldn’t apply for because you don’t meet their criteria. Guess what, many successful people have taken responsibilities which they never thought they would. What’s the worst that can happen?

<img width="100%" style="width:100%" src="https://media.giphy.com/media/by2h1l4Y21onoNtGUF/giphy-downsized-large.gif">

## 8. Be humble 🙏
Staying humble makes you a good person. And no matter how experienced you are, sometimes life will throw you curveballs. Staying humble makes facing challenges easier. You don’t wonder where you went wrong and focus more on solving the problem at hand.

## 9. Focus on fundamentals 👩🏻‍💻
In DevOps, there will always be a plethora of new tools to learn. But the concepts underlying the tools don’t change much. If your fundamentals are strong, you can easily grasp new things. For example, if you understand how the internet, computer networks, and different protocols work, it will be easier for you to understand how Docker networking works. If you understand Linux kernel features, you can break down how containerization works.

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## 10. Think long-term 🔭
Rome was not built in a day, so will be your DevOps career. The key is to show up every day and keep learning. You should have a long-term vision of where you want to see your life going and using that as a compass, keep navigating.


## 11. Practice good habits 🏃‍♀️
Good habits are hard. Our brains are wired for short-term rewards. But good habits like waking up early, having a healthy diet can go a long way in making you more productive. You should just remember that sometimes you will fail at it, don’t be too hard on yourself at those moments. And try again. There are many streak apps that can help in tricking human psychology. You can check out the [productive](https://productiveapp.io/) app.


## 12. Meditate regularly 🧘🏽‍♂️
Often while starting out as a young professionals, we don’t understand the importance of mental health. In spite of more awareness around mental health now, there is still a long way to go. A DevOps job can get very taxing mentally. You will feel that things are always breaking, so the key is to stay calm. Learn simple breathing exercises, and better if you can practice meditation. 

<img width="100%" style="width:100%" src="https://media.giphy.com/media/LM8tAshKijOuD4xIqa/giphy.gif">

## 13. Don’t compare yourself with others 🙈🙉
We grow up in an environment of competition. Career is also about competing somewhat. But in the end, you need to focus on your journey and not others. You might feel left behind sometimes, and know that it’s okay. The finish line is the same for everyone. Try to get inspired when you see someone succeeding in life and not judge yourself or blame your circumstances for not being there.


## 14. Understand the why ❓
Learn to question your actions. If you get directives to do something at your job, understand why it’s relevant. Sometimes, it won’t be relevant, but you should be aware of that. Experience is the intuition you build over time when you observe and question things around you.

<img width="100%" style="width:100%" src="https://media.giphy.com/media/1yle1ibjf4VooQfLhr/giphy.gif">


## 15. Ask for help 🙋‍♀️
In your career, you will feel that you need to figure out everything that’s given to you. It’s true, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t ask for help. Open-source libraries are a great example of the fact that someone has faced a similar problem, so be on a lookout for people who you believe can help you when you get stuck at things.


## 16. Learn when to ask for help 🗺
We should not ask for help blindly. A good thinking framework can be to list out all the things that you think might work for the problem at hand. If the list gets exhausted, and you have nothing more to try, start looking for help. This way, you can also have a healthy discussion with the person you’re approaching to get help from and they’ll know that you tried.

<img width="100%" style="width:100%" src="https://media.giphy.com/media/sxERTFNh52gJzVHVU4/giphy.gif">


## 17. Don’t undersell yourself 💶
Know your worth. This tip should be balanced out by not comparing yourself with others. But you don’t have to keep your eyes closed. You need to know what’s going on in the industry, and where are the best opportunities. You might think you don’t deserve it, but trust me and go for those things. The worst that can happen is you will end up more aware of areas you need to improve.


## 18. Don’t expect outcomes with everything 💃🕺
Sometimes the things you try won’t bear outcomes. And there will be some things you need to try just for fun and learning. These things have a weird way of helping us out in ways that we don’t expect. So don’t expect everything to have outcomes, learn things for fun.


## 19. Be patient 🙇🏻‍♀️
Any thing that is worth having takes time in life. There are no shortcuts. Tech industry is very fast paced. In 5 years, you can achieve a lot. The key is to have patience in that timeline.


## 20. Learn project management 🧑‍💻
You will be a part of numerous scrums and sprints. No job is magic, but a series of steps broken down to achieve a milestone. Setting up CI/CD for your entire org may seem daunting, but it can be done. Also try to apply some of the project management principles to your personal life too.


## 21. Take ownership 😎
It’s easy to look for someone to blame when things go wrong. But that’s not the right way to grow. When you start taking ownership, you will see more people rely on you and it uplifts your career.

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## 22. Don’t try to learn everything at the same time 🤪
And that’s where developer roadmaps help. You need to plan your career like you were in school. There is always a level 1 before that level 2. 


## 23. Be aware of imposter syndrome 😰
Imposter syndrome is more common than you think. First, you need to establish a dialogue with yourself when you feel fraudulent inside. Many times, you just need to accept that there’a reason why you’re responding that way and move ahead. It also helps to develop a positive relationship with failure.

 
## 24. Learn to be at peace with yourself 😇
Your career may seem messy and chaotic, but it’s part and parcel of life.  


## 25. Don’t be afraid of change 🤖
The tech industry is so fast faced that you might feel outdated in a career span of 5 years. It’s very real, but you need to remind yourself the reasons why you got into this role. I understand it’s a good career choice, but I would also like to believe it was because you were curious. This field has so much to offer, and anything that’s so transient will involve a lot of change. Change is the only constant, so get comfortable with it.


## 26. Give back to the community 👏
A lot of  people in DevOps are able to get into this career because of the community. And the good thing about the age of internet is that you can access that community from the comfort of your homes. So while you learn and grow because of someone in the community, also try to give back. Provide mentorship if you can, and if you learnt a cool trick deploying your last Kubernetes cluster share it with the world.

## 27. Do as much frontloading as possible 🤔
With a task at hand, the urge is to just jump at it and finish it. But it will do you good if you think before you act. Visualize and write down the steps needed to accomplish a task and you will see it saves a lot of time in the long run. The best way is to list out all the blockers that you think might come your way of accomplishing something.


## 28. Maintain a professional journal 📔
Managers and leaders at the workplace always keep telling everyone how to take data informed decisions. We have many biases and there is a lot of scientific literature to prove it. And data helps to cut through the noise. But there is no one to advise you on your professional journey with data from your career. Only you can do that. Maintaining a journal helps to document your learnings and make better decisions in the future. You can start out by planning out three months of your career and then reflecting what went well when the period is over.

<img width="100%" style="width:100%" src="https://media.giphy.com/media/nithWyrdY62pPqLd1O/giphy.gif">


## 29. Update your CV regularly ✍️
It’s just another way to maintain your professional journal. If you update your CV every quarter and every 6 months, you will be aware of the highlights that you are creating at work. If you feel that there is nothing noteworthy to mention for a long time, then it’s time to put that CV to use.


## 30. Don’t be complacent **🚴🏻‍♀️**
We are creatures of procrastination. This article was in my mind for weeks before I could pen it down. I mean, pen it down. You will fail at being proactive, but the important thing is to keep on trying, keep nudging yourself to not be complacent. 


## 31. Learn to collaborate with developers **🧑‍💻**
As DevOps engineers you will often be part of what is called a cultural shift. There might be clear demarcations of teams at your work place or there might be none. But you can sail through in any environment with the skills of collaboration especially with your dev team. They are your end users in a way, so have a healthy relationship with them. 

<img width="100%" style="width:100%" src="https://media.giphy.com/media/zOvBKUUEERdNm/giphy.gif">

## 32. Learn about containers **🐳**
In multi-cloud, hybrid, internet scale companies, containerization has become ubiquitous. Apart from the terminal commands and writing dockerfiles, get a clear understanding of what containers are. Cloud infrastructure can be unpredictable, and it’s your job to make it predictable. It will help to have a solid understanding of components that make it up.


## 33. Utilize free courses, youtube and take some paid ones **📺**
There is enough free resources on the internet to help you get your first DevOps job. The internet is your classroom, utilize it as much as possible. At the same time, be aware of not falling into the trap of tutorials. Get some practical experience.


## 34. Get good with one tool for each use-case **🕹**
There are many phases of DevOps, and for each phase there are more than one popular tool. Don’t get overwhelmed. Just pick up the most popular one and get good with it. The underlying concepts are the same and you will be able to understand a new tool in new time. 


## 35. Learn how to do POC **🕵🏾‍♂️**
As a DevOps engineer, you will be required to do POCs(proof of concept) very regularly. There will be deadlines to it, and you need to come out with recommendations at the end of it. A good tip for doing an effective POCs is that get good with documentation. And that’s the next tip.


## 36. Get comfortable with documentation **📝**
The more you document, the more effectively you can communicate ideas to your team mates, get buy-ins from the leadership and get new people onboarded fast. There is no such thing as over documentation.


## 37. Have an open mind **🧠**
There might be a new person in your team who would tell everyone how cool was a tool at his previous workplace and that you should try it. In those times you would want to assert yourself as a know-it-all. But I hope you don’t, it’s always good to have an open mind. This also applies to a lot of other scenarios.

<img width="100%" style="width:100%" src="https://media.giphy.com/media/RaN90gpPjcQXo5FqxO/giphy.gif">


## 38. Learn enough coding **👩‍💻**
Coding is not core to a DevOps role but it gives you an edge. And anyways, you can’t avoid it entirely. So get comfortable with it and the best time for it was yesterday. I would suggest Golang as many new tools in DevOps realm are based on Go, but yes Python is an excellent choice too.


## 39. Don’t follow good practices blindly **🥷**
When you sit down and research for good practices to implement at your workplace you will come across a lot of good practices. You don’t need to follow them blindly. You know your production environment best, you know your coding practices best. Pick some of them, implement and then observe. Keep iterating to fine-tune your systems to the expected SLAs.


## 40. Implement, observe and then iterate to get better **🦹‍♀️**
You will roll out things, and roll them back in. You have to build the mental muscle of doing iterations fast and know that it’s normal.


## 41. Be cognitive of small decisions **🙆‍♀️**
As a DevOps engineers, your decisions can impact the total tech cost in a big way. So make decisions with full awareness. For example, choose a monitoring tool that doesn’t make your engineering team paranoid about data ingestion.


## 42. Get better at problem-solving **🕵🏼‍♀️**
Most problems are solvable if we are able to break it down to tiny actionable steps. And with this in mind, keep throwing yourself at problems. There are many other approaches too. For unknown problems, I personally like first principles thinking. It’s what Elon Musk recommends too 🤓🚀

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I hope you will find these tips a good reminder for taking care of yourself and your career. Feel free to add on to this list in the comments.

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Where do I try to apply these tips? We're currently working on creating a full stack application performance monitoring tool at SigNoz. You can check our GitHub repo out 👇

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