2025-05-02 –, Ballroom (track sponsored by Checkmarx)
All of our DevOps journeys have been different, but a lot of them echo similar themes. We’ve all done some things right, and some things wrong, making tradeoffs along the way. Sometimes, risks pay off, and other times they don’t. I’ll look back at my 20+ years in the tech industry to use myself as an example for younger folks to learn from, and give guidance on how to learn from others.
This is my job history. There are others like it but this one is mine. In the beginning, I learned things. In the middle, I learned more things. In the later middle, I learned different things. What advice would I give someone in their early 20s? Late 20s? 30s? And why? It takes wisdom to learn from one’s mistakes but it’s far greater wisdom to learn from someone else’s. I’ve done both, and I hope to share my learnings with the class. I’ve watched myself get things wrong that others got right, and gotten things right that others struggled with. What am I worth? Big company? Medium? Private? Public? Startup? Stodgy? Answers vary depending on goals. What are yours?
Ross started his tech career as an assistant SysAdmin at an engineering firm in High School, where he was introduced to 2003 vintage monitoring tools like sar, perl, and the crontab. He was an early employee at CopperEgg -- a server/cloud monitoring SaaS company from 2011-2014 -- where he learned that "DevOps" is not just a way of life, but also a verb and job title. He currently DevOps at Logicmonitor -- yet another server/cloud monitoring SaaS company -- as a Senior DevOps Engineer where he complains about databases in his expensive time. In between the monitoring firms, he used several other monitoring technologies, all of which technically functioned I guess. In his free time he's Commander Shepard and this is his favorite talk at the conference.