Hello buddies, this blog is all about a story, my story. I will be telling you guys about how I made an entry to tech (still trying to). I am not going to give you a lot of lessons and learning here and it is up to you to take whatever lessons you find in my journey.
My background
I come from a mechanical engineering background, to be precise I have a diploma in mechanical engineering. I completed my diploma in mechanical engineering in 2021, and after that, I took a 1-year course in automotive mechatronics.
Career Curveball: A Change of Plan Midway
In the middle of my course, I fell in love with tech and had a realization that I want to make a career in tech. I completed my course anyway and didn't sit in placements as I wanted to learn a tech stack as fast as I could and make an entry in tech.
A Tensed Revelation
Around the end of my course, I had to reveal to my parents about my change of plans and boy oh boy I used to get so scared thinking about me telling them about my change of plans as they had invested a lot of money in my course and were expecting me to help them support the family. I somehow told them, it was a very tense conversation, but somehow I made them believe in me that I would make a career in tech as they had doubts about me making a career in tech without having a degree related to tech.
In Search of Tech Stack
Now I had to find a tech stack to pursue but I did not have a clue, I mean I had been searching for a tech stack since from the middle of the course when I decided to change my career but I still did not know what to learn.
I started learning DSA in Java from Kunal through his YouTube channel and I would like to give a shoutout to him, he phenomenally explains DSA in his videos and has a GitHub repository where he has posted all the assignments so that one can practice the topics learned in video sessions. The link to his DSA playlist is here and the GitHub repository where the assignment is here.
Message from an Old Friend
When I was learning DSA and had no idea about what tech stack to pursue I got a message from an old school friend who is also the co-founder of the startup in which I work. I do not remember how the conversation started but in the middle of the conversation he asked me about what I had been doing and then I asked about what he had been doing.
I got to know that he was in his Btech CS final year and had just started a startup, listening to my story he asked me if I would like to join his startup as a DevOps and Cloud Engineer, horraaaaayyyyy I felt like I had won a lottery 😂😂.
But here is the thing, I did not know anything about DevOps and cloud at that time, i mean I knew 0, nada, nothing about the role he was offering, and I told my friend the same, and he told me not to worry and to learn some basics.
The Struggles and the Way
The Struggles:
I will be honest with you here, I started learning DevOps basics from one of the best DevOps YouTube channels and I did not understand the basic concepts also I was bored as hell seeing those hourly long tutorials, my concentration would just get lost seeing hourly long videos🤷.
I anyways started my role as a DevOps dude in the startup and my friend made me understand about their product and what they wanted in the deployment of the product. I had no idea how to do any of the thing my friend want me to do.
Now the startup was small and I was the only person responsible for the deployment of the startup's product and service. So I better be serious about this, I started with just a simple search "how to deploy code to an ec2 instance and serve the site on nginx" doing this I got to know many things and I started deployment, wherever I would get stuck I would just google and see youtube videos, I remember there was need of monitoring and logging I just googled and got to know about AWS Cloudwatch logs.
I did not know about VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), security groups, load balancers, availability zones in AWS, and regions in AWS. I watch Free Code Camp's YouTube channel, they have a course on AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.
Watching this course I understood the basics, I now knew about VPC, security group, regions, redundancy, scalability and all, but I still had doubts like- can services in a VPC talk to services in other VPC's? Can services in multiple AWS regions communicate with each other? Can I make deployment across multiple regions if yes our deployment would be redundant, oh hey why not deploy it across AWS and Azure, it would be much more redundant. I searched about how to do these, I got to know what I was trying to do is called a multi-cloud architecture.
The Way:
I searched all my doubts like these in Google and asked Chat GPT and my basics would just get stronger and stronger and I started enjoying DevOps.
See what I want you to learn from this is that, learning DevOps was boring for me when I had no idea about what are the purposes of the DevOps concepts and tools although the tutors on YouTube would tell about the purpose and need of DevOps concepts and tools and they did a good job explaining it but it would not make a connection with me. But when I did deployments myself and got stuck in usual DevOps problems and searched for solutions, I found various DevOps tools that solved that problem, hence I was able to understand and make a connection with DevOps concepts and tools. Doing this got me interested in DevOps. This is the way you should learn anything, by doing.
A Sweet Fruit from a Failure
I completed my architecture and made everything ready for deployment but because of some issues, the startup did not work and services never got deployed on the architecture but I learned so much from this startup and wrote blogs about my learnings. I blogged about an implementation that I did in this startup and took part in the WeMakeDevs Blogging Challenge, my blog got selected in the challenge as a result I got cool swags which I would consider a sweet fruit from a failure.
The Future
The previous startup did fail but we did not lose hope, My friend started a startup again and I am so happy to tell you that we have launched the product and I am proud to mention here that I did the complete deployment of the product and services and I will be sharing my learnings and the tools which I have implemented in the deployment through my blogs.
The product that we have launched is wisecody which is an AI assistant in your project code directory, consider this as Chat GPT in your project code directory which has all the knowledge of your specific project codebase, you can ask anything about your codebase or maybe tell it what your code needs to do and it will give you modified code that can make the code work as you intend it to do or maybe you have a bug in your code, no worries it will help you in finding the bug and resolving it in your specific code directory. All suggestions will be specific to your project codebase.
Although the product is in beta stage and I will suggest you to expect major and minor bugs, but still has the potential to help you, also we are constantly improving it over time. Just install a vs code extension. Below is the link to the website from where you can have all the information and download the extension.
So this was my journey till now, if you like the blog, feel free to show your support by reacting to the blog and following me. If you have any thoughts to share , feel free to comment your thoughts.
******Thank you for reading😁😇******