
Ask HN: Anxiety of learning Python and Devops (Kubernetes)? - simplecto
When I go to industry events and meetups I meet a lot of younger devs and more senior people re-tooling their skills. They express frustration that it is not enough to simply update with python, but that you also have to have the devops mindset as well.<p>They feel like the workload is 2x or 3x because the responsibilities have expanded beyond code alone. The anxiety they express is that the goal posts keep moving, and they feel left behind.<p>Question to the group -- have you experienced this, or do you see it among your peers?
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potta_coffee
I'm in a position where my responsibilities have expanded from just coding to
doing a bunch of "devops" things, containers, CICD, clusters (we're using ECS
rather than Kubernetes). It's extremely daunting to think about mastering all
of these things. My advice is to focus on solving problems. Learn what you
need to solve the problem at hand, and then move on. For me, it's the only way
I survive. I'd never get anything done if I had to master Kubernetes before
actually accomplishing anything.

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bg24
+1 for this. Gives you immense satisfaction. Learn tools in the process.

"focus on solving problems"

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lunias
Software architecture has changed a lot with the advent of "the cloud" \-
which IMO, is just a marketing term for the hybrid of the pre-existing
internet and distributed computing. This sort of highly distributed and
complex architecture (i.e. microservices) has seemingly become a standard for
or at least a mild-expectation of all new applications. In order to wrangle
the complexity introduced by an architecture built for 99.9999% uptime and
infinite scalability you'll need to learn some tools to help you along the
way.

Now, do you need all those things for your app? I think you'll definitely need
to know UNIX to a reasonable degree, but all the other stuff (Docker, Ansible,
Terraform, CircleCI, Kubernetes, etc. etc.) are just specialized tools for
helping alleviate some effort in deployment and infrastructure management.

Start small and use what you want / need.

devops is important because developers tend to know best the requirements /
quirks of their application. If you have it running on your laptop it
shouldn't be too hard to get it running on a remote server. I'd assert, much
easier for the developer of the app than for an ops specialist with no
knowledge of the app that they're deploying.

devops can be as simple as a bash script.

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itronitron
I've experienced this in a job interview for a software dev/data scientist
position. The hiring manager asked about devops experience (probably
specifically docker) and I honestly told them what my experience was (related,
but not 'docker'). Their interest in me clearly ended with that and I didn't
really care because _if_ devops had been mentioned in the position description
I would not have applied.

I find the expectation for devops experience to be rather hilarious because if
devops was a priority for the company then they would have worked it out and
it would be a service available to developers rather than a job
responsibility.

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PaulHoule
I worked with some folks who Dockerized most things and were expecting to get
it working with Kube but were secretly hoping to put it off as long as they
could.

