DevOps took my life from development to production.It was early 2018, I was a parent of a toddler, and working with my partner to operate a Chinese Dim-Sum Food Truck in the Raleigh-Durham area. I routinely worked 60+ hour weeks and was on-call 24/7. I was left overworked, overstimulated, and burnt out.At this point in my life, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had been a marine, a personal trainer, a plumber, a carpenter, managed the front of house for a restaurant, and managed staffing, operations and maintenance for a highly successful food truck, but none of it was truly stimulating for me.Remembering how I used to disassemble and reassemble motherboards as a child, I was driven to seek a new career in IT. I took a shot at one of those overpriced career colleges, and made my way into a Network+ class. I found myself assigned a final project with the content up to me. Naturally, I decided I wanted to show off my pretty brain and have a bit of fun. I decided to demonstrate how to use Kali Linux and Python(no prior knowledge of either) to crack the School’s Wi-Fi network. Needless to say, it wasn’t quite as straight-forward as I expected it to be. The most challenging part turned out to be the installation and configuration of Linux. It took me down a 20+ hour rabbit hole, filled with iced coffee and Stack Overflow, grub configurations and init.d scripts. The result being a bald spot, and barely working demo. My teacher was so excited by my problem-solving prowess and encouraged me to immediately apply for an open Junior DevOps role at Informatica. I applied, interviewed, and was accepted into a new world that was more mentally stimulating and rewarding than anything I’d ever done before.Since starting that first DevOps role in 2018, I’ve developed strong interests and knowledge in Kubernetes, Docker, Monitoring and Observability, Agile Methodologies, Service Meshes, API Gateways, OIDC/OAuth2, GitOps, Infrastructure as Code, and Internal Development Platforms.I reached Epistemix at the start of 2021 and have built scalable and fault tolerant infrastructure, serverless backends, development pipelines, and API’s from the ground up. Stepping up for the chance to challenge myself, build upon my previous experiences, and own my work has been the opportunity of a lifetime.