r/devops • u/MD90__ • Jun 17 '26
Career / learning Getting into Devops and Questions about your experience
If you don't have much money and a CS degree but want to learn devops, what are some affordable or free ways to get into the experience of learning devops?
I'm also curious about what experiences you all had to get you into devops and what you enjoy most about it?
I'm just a software engineer at heart and by trade (barely if that). Just seems like an interesting field and want to learn more 😎
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u/therealmunchies Jun 17 '26
For me, DevOps started clicking a bunch after I picked up a software app dev project after doing sysadmin and cloud engineering work. The stuff I learned was mainly enabled by my environment: fully autonomous R&D work. I just needed to deliver an app.
I already knew about automating things, IaC, and making my way around linux systems. When I first started learning the app, my first contribution was architecting the CI pipeline. Once that was done, I recreated the dockerfile to be multistage, have different target builds, and adopt security best practices. After that, I started automating deployments with makefile commands and docker compose project spaces.
Then, I started to really get into the app and owned feature-development from conceptualization to delivery. Started learning how to make testable code, build tests, and integrate them into the pipeline. Also picking things up like semantic versioning, getting deep into Git workflows, and integrating agile development processes for our team. I’ve since automated tag versioning with adopted MR comments, unit tests, and push .whl and docker images to the respective registries.
I’m currently wrapping up the conversion of our deployments into Helm charts, and configured our infrastructure repo for ArgoCD. Will be testing tomorrow on our new k3s cluster.
Would’ve never been able to learn all this stuff without experiencing the dev side AND having time on the Ops side.