Hi, my name is Henry Quinn and in July I’ll be “learning in public.”
Last month, my buddy Alex Trost started a learn in public month after reading this post by Shawn Wang. In 30 short days he really upped his game with SVG animations (enough where he was asked to create an eLearning course about it), so I figure there must actually be some benefit to learning, and then teaching, something new every day.
“Henry, what does learning in public actually mean?”
Great question, reader. Learning in public pretty much means what it sounds like. A lot of people will learn things on their own, with folks at work, or within silo’d Slack communities. It’s great that they’re upping their skills, but they’re not necessarily sharing what the found with the greater development community. The learning in public “movement” (lol) is all about sharing what you learn. Writing blogs, creating tutorials, or making videos to pass on what you learn.
Imposter syndrome is a really real thing in our industry, but it’s important to remember that no matter how little you think you actually know, there’s always someone coming up underneath you who knows less. They might be able to glean something from you that sparks an interest and accelerates their career. God knows I wouldn’t be in the DevOps field right now without some of the folks over at New Haven IO pushing me in the right direction.
So all of that said, after years of me telling people looking for technical help that “if you can’t find the blog post, it’s time for you to write the blog post”… it’s time for me to start actually writing the blog posts.
“That’s cool and all, but why should I read anything you write?”
Again, GREAT QUESTION. I should probably tell you a little about myself. (I’ll also drop a link to my resume and LinkedIn at the bottom of this article, in case anyone’s curious.)
I graduated from Champlain College in 2015 with a degree in Computer Networking & Information Security. I promptly got a job as a DBA for the United States District Court, District of Connecticut where I taught myself to build web applications and eventually became a one man dev shop for the district.
After building a few things and getting invited to speak at a couple of judiciary technology conferences, I was eventually brought on half-time with the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in Washington, D.C. to scale out a product we built for CT to be used by courts across the country.
I left that job for reasons I’ll talk about later in the month (burnout is a REAL thing), and found a great job as a DevOps Engineer for Clarity Software Solutions. I’m only five weeks into this new role, but I love it so far. It’s a mix of release management and process automation.
I’m learning a LOT here and I want to share what I learn with you. I wouldn’t be where I am without the folks in my local tech group passing their knowledge down to me, so this is partly me paying that kindness forward. It’s part me wanting to keep a log of everything I learned so I can look back on this fondly when I’m older. And it’s also part me wanting to get better at what I do. One of the tenets of learning in public is that teaching is one of the best ways to learn. Call me selfish if you must. :)
So July, for me, was going to be a deep dive on process automation with Bash and GoLang. However, since this is real life, things sometimes need to change. This month I find myself needing to switch gears to learning more about Kubernetes. We’re building out some really cool containerized tools, so having a platform on which we can host all of them and kick off jobs remotely is going to be a big help. By the end of the month, I want to have a cluster set to hold our tools that I know from the inside out. Though, there will definitely be some automation thrown in there for good measure.
With all of that said, I think this is going to be a really fun month. My plan is to share something new with you every day and that we can communicate and learn together as a community.
I’ll be back tomorrow with a new post about something DevOps-y, but until then smash that “Like” button, hit “Subscribe”, and stay frosty.
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