So it’s been so long and I was wondering what should I write? Past few months were full of learning as I was working as a DevOps intern at Ishi Systems so I thought to share my experience on “I can call it hottest buzz word we are listening now a days” - DevOps . I will also talk about the work culture and key lessons learnt during this period.
What is DevOps?
As I am new to this term as most of us and it’s bit difficult to explain what DevOps actually is I would rather explain it in my own words. As you can see the term comprises of two words “Development” and “Operations”, DevOps are the people who can manage both of them being Agile team for the rapid development of the product or service. Obviously you can google it and learn more about it. You must be feeling that if I can not define the term itself how can I call my self DevOps? Well it’s matter of understanding and practical learning. You will get to know as you read further. Have some patience and read on.
In our case we were very small team (4 members) with very well experienced person as a mentor ( or Lead) and three interns including me. The project on which we were working was a Full Stack Python application. Did I mention that all the interns were new to Python? I guess no. So we learnt python programming in initial training period (about a month) also we learnt few other technologies which I will talk about later. Still you must be having same question where the hell DevOps comes to the picture? Ok let me tell you few reasons.
- Rapid development - We were doing weekly ( or every ten day) releases in our project
- Deployment Automation - Our application deployment is fully automated using Ansible
- UI designing - With this small team we were doing both front-end and back-end development
- R&D - The project required use of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing and we did that too. :)
- Client Interaction
- Monitoring and Analysis
- Testing
- All those hell amount of things comes into the picture during development ( I can write many things here but I think this is sufficient to answer the question)
Ok, so I think now you got it what I mean by being a DevOps intern. So let me further talk about the key lessons learnt during this time. I would prefer separating out technical learning as anybody can learn/adopt new technologies with little or more effort and time ( given that they have brain :P )
What I learnt in terms of technologies?
As I stated earlier we were new to Python but I knew Java and C++ so it didn’t take much time for me to learn Python. Apart from this I can add following list to my learning catalogue.
- AngularJS - Another emerging tool by Google for simplifying your web apps
- Django
- Dropbox API
- LinkedIn API
- Ansible, nginx, uwsgi
- Log monitoring tools
- Analytics tools
- Docker
- Nltk & Scikit-learn libraries ( for machine learning and Natural language processing)
- TextBlob
Ok, so these are the technologies but what apart from this? I couldn’t get the proper term for other learnings but I think I should call them life lessons as I prefer them carrying with me all the times. So here are those lessons:
- Being Agile
- A little more Agile
- and a little more Agile
wtf! what is this? calm down calm down. So when you have full decision making power with the responsibility of making your product successful and if you can handle the situation properly I guess that is the best learning for any developer. I feel myself lucky for being part of such small team and following those guideline ( rules? huh, Dude there are no rules in agile. It’s flexible :P ) from Agile manifesto8.
Work culture @Ishisystems
People are being more careful about the work culture of the company and specifically when it comes to an internship they emphasize more on it as most likely it’s their first interaction with the industry. when it comes to work culture those stories read from the sites likes quora about work culture of giant companies like Google, facebook, etc comes to our mind. But not all companies can provide such perks and benefits. In my case we have an open culture at Ishi, flexible work hours, work from home, Friday breakfasts, friendly colleagues and an X-box and always busy TT table too.
Takeaways from this experience
Did I tell you I am now Jr. Programmer Analyst at Ishi? What else can be a better takeaway from an exciting internship to a Job offer.
Final Words
I hope you enjoyed reading this post. If yes, express your love in comments else express your anger in comments. :)