We had a conversation with a tenacious young woman who got into DevOps engineering by chance and has stayed because of the process of learning. She talks us through her journey in the tech scene; how she started in cloud engineering before majoring in DevOps, and what she would be doing for money if not tech.
What’s your name?
Feyisayo Famakinde.
What do you do?
I am a DevOps Engineer.
Why DevOps?
I picked DevOps by chance actually. I didn’t want something that involved too much code, but alas I am back to code.
When I say it was by chance, it was during the 2020 “period” when I was at home and had nothing to do. I had recently left a job that wasn’t even good in the first place.
I have always thought I didn’t have the head for tech until one of my best girls started writing codes right in front of my eye.
I was like “this thing can’t be that terrible, let me try it”, so I told people around me and one day my friend forwarded a link for the Google X Andela Scholarship program to me.
It had Web, Android and Cloud paths and since I didn’t want to code, I chose the cloud path. I watched videos, did various labs and after some projects, we were evaluated for the Google Cloud associate engineer exam voucher, I made the mark. I was so scared while writing the exam but I passed.
Then came the job search o. I even went the extra mile and did the Google IT support course on Coursera just to have foundational knowledge because everything looked like magic but there were no cloud engineering roles in Nigeria, everything Cloud I saw had DevOps in it.
I found that people used more of Microsoft Azure too so I looked into SheCode Africa, lucky for me, that was when the DevOps path was launched.
I did personal projects first but when I started feeling like I was in a loop of only projects, I started messaging managers on LinkedIn for an internship position. By God’s grace, someone gave me a chance and that’s been it since then.
So does that mean there’s a difference between DevOps and Cloud Engineering?
There is a stark difference.
Cloud Engineering is knowing how to operate cloud platforms actually, been able to use the services they offer. DevOps itself isn’t really a role, it’s like a culture. A culture of automation, saving time, saving resources.
DevOps is a whole lot of tooling and processes. But to excel at DevOps these days you need to know Cloud Engineering because most organizations host their services in the cloud these days.
So it means that first off you started in cloud engineering and then you specialized in DevOps right?
Yes.
Before tech, what was your background?
I studied English in school. I also had a brief stint with digital marketing and then business operations for a while.
How much coding do you do as a DevOps engineer?
I write YAML for Kubernetes and CI/CD. I am learning python for automation at the moment.
How’s Python?
I am struggling with python at the moment but hopefully, it gets easier
In this journey into DevOps, what challenges did you face?
The never-ending learning o. I haven’t finished and there is still more.
And how did you overcome them?
Tenacity really. Trying to keep on. Then knowing basics, Once you know the basics, Everything else isn’t all that insurmountable.
So for those of us that are non-tech, describe your job to us.
For DevOps. I would come up with something. DevOps is the process of making code deployment easier and faster and cheaper too. So you are considering a whole lot, the business perspective, the technical and operational perspective together. You are building processes that check your code, build it, test it and deploy it.
If you didn’t need to work again and earn money, what would you do for fun?
Travel but I think it would be exhausting. I have to be on my feet though. I don’t think I would change whatever I am doing. I have found out that being active helps me a lot.
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