4 Cultures That I Learned During My First Week of DevOps Bootcamp
So today, I’ve finished the first week of my first ever devops bootcamp at GoTo Financial. I have learnt a lot during the previous core engineering week and one of the thing I learned is, devops is actually pretty hard! (I’m used to just copy pasting anything for deployment :D). So without further ado, here are the cultures that I have learnt during the first week of devops bootcamp.
Read the documentation
yeah, yeah, i can’t possibly understand this whole document! Let’s watch youtube tutorial instead!
A lot of the times, I, and I believe a lot of developers when learning a technology, we tend to rely on short medium posts or a youtube video to learn it. It is fine, even recommended to do that to make sure you are able to learn about the technology. But afterwards, we need to actually read the documentation instead of googling the stuff we should be able to read on the documentation!
Doing this, we can deepen our understanding about the technology that we are using, rather than relying on our limited base knowledge from the short tutorial and stackoverflow whenever we run into trouble. Sure, we can learn it this way and after the 10th time googling it, it might get stuck in our brain. But isn’t it better to read the documentation to gain a deeper understanding so that if there’s a trouble we can rely on our knowledge instead.
There’s also stuffs like best practices, different approach, etc, etc that you can learn from reading the documentation, so just read the docs!
Know your stuff
After reading the documentation, we, as a programmer, need to know our stuffs as well. Knowing your stuff means that when you copy paste a command or a configuration file from the documentation or forum, you know the function of every line that you type. For example, if you encounter the command that list processes running on port 3000(lsof -i :3000 ) then you need to understand what lsof means, what the -i flag does, and why is there a colon before the port?
Okay, that might sounds like an exaggeration but it’s not. In this bootcamp, we are encouraged to be curious about stuffs that we take for granted. In the first day, we are given this learning material that teaches us to learn the commands in linux (which I haven’t finished, sorry coaches :D). So yeah, know your stuff well so there’s no unused code in your codebase.
The twelve factor app
This is kinda the twelve rules for deploying an application. You can read more about it here. Basically, it is a list of rules to deploy an application, and it can be applied to developing the app as well. It is really short, so just give it a try!
Google it before you ask!
This is the last rule and kinda like an unspoken rule. In the bootcamp, whenever we ask a question we have to already google it before we ask. If there’s no definitive answer on what we’re searching, we can ask the coaches and to the whole class. I believe this is a really great practice since this doesn’t inconvenience others that we are asking from, also we get to practice putting in the right keywords for google.
All and all, the whole bootcamp until now is a really positive experience for me. Even though it’s hard, it’s really rewarding to learn all the new technologies and stuff that I haven’t ever touched before.
This article cannot be written without the help of GTF Devops Bootcamp Team. So thankyou very much and shoutout to:
- The Coaches : Coach Imre, Zufar, Vijay, and Albert for teaching us in this devops bootcamp
- My peers from the GTF Bootcamp
- Kak Tiara & Mutia for managing the platform & schedules
Thanks everyone! Let’s hope the 2nd week doesn’t have as much hw as the first one (:
