When you stop to look around your organization, you can start to see where there are needs. In my support / operational role at the time, it seemed clear that automation and coding was the next step. Here’s how I made that transition.
Setting The Context
My hope here is to provide some useful resources to anyone looking to understand how to climb the mountain that is software development and to share some guidance based on my own journey.
When I started coding, I had spent the better part of 6–7 years working as a software support analyst. That journey led me into tasting a bit of network troubleshooting and configuration, and eventually into becoming a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). I could write a book about how to be a good SRE, but Google folks beat me to it. A core facet of being a good SRE is to know how to code; and to embed one’s self in the organization’s product. Our SRE team was essentially a Python shop, so down the rabbit hole I went.
I. Early Steps & Learning
I knew that before I could contribute anything, I needed to plant my feet in understanding what code looked like and how it behaved. So the first thing I did was actually enroll in Codecademy Pro (my company at the time was willing to pay…
