With more than 20 years in the tech industry at the age of 38 I will explain why you don’t should think the success of your profession will come to you fast!
It requires many hours of hard work with failure, family and friend sacrifices, lots of disappointment for close people you love around you, and lots of questions no one can answer!
I will explain a little story about my life myself and how I’m coming to the point of skills I have today, it's a timeline that requires a lot of work, isolation, and combining with my hobby and professional work so I almost spent average. 10–12 hours a day I think combined work, hobbies, and study of new stuff not because I should but because it's a part of my life and I love that part so much I will do anything to keep it this way.
I hear many time people ask how can you be soe good and know so much about anything of what you doing today, and how can you continue what you doing 24 hours a day and keep loving your work?
What many do not know is I had a hard childhood, my mom was alone with 4 children because she was separated from my dad, and the boyfriend my mom found and has been with for a long time in my childhood had alcoholic problems, first when I was around 15–16 I think she got a very good boyfriend when she later got marry with again after my dad, and I have contact with my dad today but its first happen in my young adult years so my childhood has not been the dream but its okay love my mom and dad still so everything is good today :)
So if we start with a timeline when I got interested in the computer industry it's around when a computer was 2x86 and 4x84, in our family we got one from my uncle can’t remember if he worked or owned the computer store, but I can remember the 4x84 have 20mhz and 512kb memory and running DOS and Windows 3.11 that's my first computer I got access to, I have been around 7–8 years old here.
Here I learned to use DOS commands and open Windows 3.11 to play games, but very fast it got boring just to use a computer and not know what was happening inside it so I started to go to the local recycling place and take trash computers home, and study what happing inside, this time you will not really have CD-Rom inside it but just floppy-drive big hard drive.
So what happened next is after several tries I collected multiple parts of hardware and put it into a fully working computer, my first success but a trying with failed in many 3–6 months at the age of 9–10 years I think it around (1993–1995), my mom drive all the trash back to the recycling place and I tog my bike a couple of days later to get more to my room! :)
Now the new computer standard is coming you have the tower and in 1997 my mom bought a computer from shes work at this time, it was a Compaq computer with 700 MHz I think and 128 MB memory, its was a huge beast at this time, but the internet still not normal yet, and we are using 56k modems over our telephone network so we got around 30min internet a day max because she pays for each min we were online at this time and the computer is running 98, I don’t remind we ever have money to buy a computer with Windows 95, its an OS I later get and trying out but it was more for fun.
Now in 1997, I’m 12 years old and still do not have the biggest experience yet with development, i have loaned some books from the library with floppy disks about Q-Basic a developer language working in DOS and then I found some hacking ways to jump out of systems on Windows 3.11 and DOS when there was security on it to protect agents child to make stupid thinks :)
I did not have so many friends, I think I have 3 friends I spent time with, so I’m living very isolated and spent a lot of time with myself and trying out different computer stuff, it's going pretty bad in the school I’m word blind and first learn to write my name and address in a class of 6, you are around 13 years old so I have a lot of trouble in school and fell me like a problem people don't want to spend time on so I spent time with my self and learn different things.
On the homefront, it's not going well I have done different things and my mom has problems controlling me and was a friend I got removed from because I did a lot of stupid things back in time, so she sent me on “Efterskole” it's a kind private-school where you sleep smilies like colleagues but it's for 14–17 years child and you have some rules and in my case, I think it was the return point to get control of my life and I thank my mom today she removes me from the child city and sending me this way even that's was hard to understand back then.
I’m landing on an IT “Efterskole” where all students have their computer. I came from Windows 3.11 and Windows 98 to now learned there exits more OS than just from Microsoft, we were using OS/2 it's very similar to Windows 3.11 just with more features what I remember
I think I’m around 14 or 15 years old here, and at that point, I still didn’t know anything about what was developing, only touched the Q-Basic, and did not understand 100% what was happening, then a magazine in Denmark was coming to the stream “PC Planet” in this magazine there are writing a line of HTML I still remember its, it was a link tag look like this!
<a href=”about.html”>About</a>
What I thought when I saw this was something like WHAT THE HELL, can I use Notepad on Windows save it as an other-than-text format, and show it inside a browser? that's cool and I think everything for me starts with an HTML A tag, at this time you were lucky if you found 5 MB web hosting space for free, domains were very expensive still here so that was a real game changer for me.
So because the OS/2 did not have the tools for developing I understand at this point, I borrowed a PC from the local library and have a floppy disk with me where I develop on, take it with me back to my room and yeah, my first HTML websites are born and hosted on a floppy disk! tada…. welcome the to start of 2000! :)
During my 2 years on “Efterskole” I learn there was more than just an HTML I learn about ASP and PHP server-side languages and one more time I think WHAT THE FUCK!!!!! can I send a request from the client to a server, render something, and show it back the to client? so now I can build login systems and so on!
The problem at this time was you did not just install PHP on your Windows computer and Linux was very hard to use if you didn’t spend a lot of time a lot of stuff did need to be compiled at your self and modded to work I knew people dere did that and I think I wont to spent my time on something else at this point developing and try to learn ASP or PHP, it's ending up with PHP for me.
Everything here is still back in time, and there the cloud did not exist, and the network is around 10/100mbit ethernet, and most people use hubs and not switches because it was much cheaper, so we are very long back right now! :)
Then I’m finished with the required school and have a period of my life when I come back home to my mom and should wait until I start on an education I have signed up for 2 (IT Supporter or Multi-Media Integrator) to the education, and I have been accepted the Multi-Media Integrator and the challenges were here our cheaters already on day one say
This education is hard to complete becures there a lots of company there don’t want un-education people, and you need a company after 1 year to where you get learn more in 2,5 year
I can see a lot of my classmates already here gave up and just spent time in class playing Counter-Strike and not learning something, the school will teach me ASP and not PHP and I say I won’t learn ASP I will learn PHP because I know already something about it, its was very close to I get kicked out of the school here but I’m was one of the very few there basically have skills before starting on this education and in Denmark the school get money for every completed study so we are assigned an agreement I was responsible for my education when it's coming to developing so I start self-learning in the school with PHP and search a company to get more skills, and I got it so in 2007 I’m completed my education.
I realize after this time in school, the company I need to learn more and I need to do it myself it will require more time than you get paid for because a company has the idea of profit as making sense but I will learn more and get better to know to solve the same problem twist and that needs some learning.
I quit my study company around 2010 because I felt I did not learn enough and did not get paid based on my knowledge, in this place, I still only knew PHP, JavaScript, and HTML for the web, the basics of networking, hardware, and some very basic Windows server tools and Ubuntu/Debian setup for Apache webserver!
Then I got a work where I gained more knowledge about server administration, but still not enough to be safe to say I can do more than maintain a website using an Apache web server and a MySQL database, so I started learning about performances and how to reduce slow code, how OOP code sometimes can introduce bottlenecks if you did not do it right and so on, a lot of learning here but still in the PHP area, but we are still not global have the “big data” problems yet, so everything is good! :)
Then in 2015 got a job for a Danish hardware company there sold hardware to customers and had a website built in PHP and using MySQL, at this point I was around 30 years old and was responsible for the infrastructure, and we still did not have too much about the cloud yet but we have Windows Hyper-V, VM cloud providers and VMWare ESXi so different ways to run system isolated so here I start learning a lot of the problems there was when I’m starting on the job and then I’m intruding microservices architecture not on the perfect way but in a way there work based on my knowledge as this time.
It ended up with a very nice infrastructure of around 25 VMs for production and staging environments and its runs both MySQL, MongoDB and RabbitMQ, Redis based on different challenges and products, its have integration between external partners, and a price calculation engine to calculate 2,5 millions of products every 30min, so whats starting here is was I come with only PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and HTML skills on the developer front and very small SysOps skills but in almost 6 years in my position its ending up with a huge tech stack to optimize the work and its only required around 3–4 developers to control and maintain.
All the Hyper-V VMs were running in-house on consumer-graded hardware, my idea here was we have backups of the VMs and if a computer did we could quickly replace it, and memory and CPU were much cheaper than enterprise server hardware.
The front was placed in an external data center so it synced all products, stock profiles and so between the inhouse system and to the data center, this protects its agents if some developer mistake happens internally its not take the frontend website down, and the frontend website is running on very low hardware because its build to have products into MongoDB, the search engine with ElasticSearch and some caching stuff with Memcache on the frontend, what I remember its used 2x 2cpu, 8gb ram for the frontend server, NGINX proxy in the front and then an ElasticSearch server with around 4cpu and 16 GB memory.
Then it was time to get new challenges because my idea to replace our VMs with Dockers was not met well, and my idea was a part of the rest of the company, I’m probably thinking too fast and people did not understand what I thinking to do and Covid coming and the statement from the boss is we need to come into work as much as possible because else we did not work, so find a new job in 2020 to keep the hybrid working mode some days home and some days on the office.
One of the things I think COVID has been good for us to know, the balance between home and work, if you love your work as much as me it's nice to have the balance to work anywhere you want and still spend time with your family, I have at this point in 2020 a little girl and the priorities changes not I will work less but I will find a way to spent more time with my girlfriend and my baby-girl so to change a job there fit into my life balance was a very great position for me, and it's open a new world for me how you can learn more, have more fun with your work and still close tasks and be happier.
But what I also learn at the new job is meetings kill me slowly and when project leaders did not know a shit about the projects there want to have done and when the responsible leader just hires more project leaders and estimates the tech team it gets huge chaos.
I hope companies stop using the word “resources” about where staff and stop using “project” about a product and then go to product management and not project management, the huge difference here is you teach people about what there can and not can and not just as a resource there fixing shitty tasks so you SCRUM board looks pretty out its killing people including me so stop wast time on project management and resources and start using peoples skills and use product management to keep your products maintained and secure!
But I learned a lot in the 1,5 years I stayed there, I learned how to NOT lead a company, how to NOT manage your staff, and what kind of employees I NOT want to work together with again!
And it was the start of my Kubernetes, Docker, and Cloud journey starting here!
Then I jumped to a new position as a Cloud Engineer and have learned a LOT more in these 2 years than I have in the last 5 years, ofc I have knowledge with me of mistakes, failure and so I can use it to navigate but what I mean about learning a lot more are based on the trust of my leader I have the trust about what I’m saying is true and the trust too late I learn more in a field love to learn more in and i got specialized in 2 fields and not just working as an octopus developer/DevOps anymore i have huge knowledge so i can help but I spent a lot of time get even more powerful in my field area
That's what I call success, it took me more than 20 years to get success in my profession with a lot of tries, failures hard work low sleep, and more, if you not are willing to make sacrifices and only work 8–16 jobs and don’t have it as your hobby/lifestyle its will be hard for you to feel success in the long term!
Today I have a lot of knowledge about how to optimize a developer team to spend less time on infrastructure and management and how to automate the deployment process with much more.
Today I'm certified in 3x Kubernetes and 3x AWS,
Thanks a lot for reading my story! :) hope you will leave a comment with question or feedback, i will try to response back on it! :)
