TL;DR
I write stuff in this blog.
Hi, I’m Lawrence, a DevOps engineer since 2021. I have been looking forward to setting up a personal blog for a long time, and now I have taken the first step. This blog will mostly contain technical writings about the DevOps field, and the content may change in the future.
Why I’m a DevOps Engineer
In college, I majored in English literature and had a classmate from abroad who wanted to apply to an art-related school after graduation. Due to restrictions, he was not able to access Google services in his region. As his good friend, I started to study networking and VPNs to help him browse the internet freely and quickly. During my study, I encountered many tutorials with one-click scripts for VPN on self-hosted VPS. I considered them user-friendly but boring if I could set them up with just one tap. Inspecting the scripts became my first lesson; I learned each line of code and tried to understand its behavior and purpose. Frankly, it was frustrating without a tutor to assist. I remember that the Vim editor took me almost a day to learn how to edit and save.
The best feeling of learning this script stuff on the terminal is totally understanding the root cause and solving it on your own. After spending a lot of time researching networking and VPNs, I rented a VPS server and installed various things on it, learning Nginx, systemd, certificate registration, DNS record setting, etc. Finally, my friend could access Pinterest via my server, and he successfully applied to an art school. I won’t say my server helped him get into art school, but I would say at least I made it easier for him to study. After the success of setting up the server, I was a senior in college and started thinking that applying for a position as a network engineer could be a good idea.
I did not think applying for an engineering job was easy at that time. Furthermore, I did not have a computer science background, which could be a disadvantage. To avoid lacking a basic understanding of networking and Linux systems, I enrolled in a training program founded by the Bureau of Labor. After attending the training program for six months, I improved my understanding of networking and Linux systems. I wanted to find a job that involved writing code and working in the Linux terminal, and I found DevOps.
In my first job, I dived into Linux for almost 8 hours a day during work since we provided a SaaS for telecom companies. Most of the time was spent troubleshooting and writing automation based on shell scripts and Ansible. I gained a lot of troubleshooting skills in Linux. Thanks to my colleagues and my team lead who taught me the essence of solving problems.
In my second job, I still worked as a DevOps engineer, this time in a crypto exchange, which was viral in 2022. The reason I transferred from a SaaS company to a crypto startup was that the tech stacks were new to me and cloud adoption was trending. Having solid experience with Linux systems was a plus in my position at this startup since sometimes we used EC2 to handle special cases, so troubleshooting in Linux became significant if the process stopped due to environment issues. I learned Docker, Kubernetes, Grafana, EKS, AWS Cloud and many things in these two years. Thanks to my colleague Tina, who is good at AWS Cloud; Harlan, who is familiar with Kubernetes and networking; and Michael, who is a team lead and open-minded about new things. I had great memories at this startup.
My current job is my third job. I’m working as a DevSecOps engineer in a cybersecurity company, learning new skills and adapting to a culture that handles services for developers globally.
Thank you for reading this long introduction.