It’s never too late to change your career to DevOps if you’re a Software Engineer

My name is Soufiane Bouchaara, I’m a Lead DevOps Engineer with +5 years experience in software engineering, starting with PHP, C#.NET to Javascript, Python, Go, and a bit of Rust.

I’ve done both Dev and Ops in my career and found the division almost impossible from both sides. Long before “DevOps” was a named thing, engineers like me were working to tear down that wall and provide enablement through automation.

Switching my mission to DevOps was a very challenging step, because it’s about a new culture and not just coding.

It’s bout maintaining the integrity of the product, site reliability engineering by wearing a lot of different hats and shift focus constantly, depending on incoming fires

I have accumulated a concrete and successful experience in implementing and adapting SLOs(Service Level Objectives) to examine what is the level of the reliability of service, in order to improve it. Moreover, Cost killing is also one of my strengths.

It’s about a strange feeling when you become a Senior Software Engineer with more than 5 years of experience, you feel like starting from scratch again, but being at this position with a strong background of software engineering enabled me to deep dive into the architectural level of every project that I’m working on and be part of every C-Level decisions, not only a simple Ops used to deploy and monitor.

Being part of C-Level decisions enabled me to focus on the ROI (Return On Investment) by fastening deployments and automation which decreased time to market and reduce any human intervention,

Although productivity is more difficult to quantify from a financial standpoint than regular Ops metrics, Lead DevOps should take a big responsibility to improve the return on investment.

Lead DevOps engineers are successful in their lives if strong backgrounds of programming and framework both is there.

People coming from any department to DevOps should understand what the developers are doing in the development phase and how they are managing the versions of codes, integrating, deploying to servers. Once they understand how things are done manually with no automation tools, things will get easier for them. In Addition to this, one can’t become expert in DevOps, if he is not good in operations.

Being able to assist in maximizing my company’s investment and at the same time increase velocity for delivering new and difference-making features while doing so with increased efficiency is deeply gratifying.