On Jan 28th, 2023, DFWCIA hosted our first seminar after the Lunar New Year.
The seminar starts at 2pm CDT after we take our team photo and played some happy Lunar New Year music. First DFWCIA president Xin Wang introduced our organization and our event Chair and Director of Education Gerry Huang introduced all the volunteers who have worked hard to prepare for this event Maria Zheng, Shuming Liu, Mark Yin, Jie Song, Tianyu Cui and our speaker Timothy Allen. Timothy Allen is currently a senior data/DevOps engineer at USAA. He works part time as a adjunct professor at Austin Community College teaching DevOps topics such as Docker and Kubernetes. He also worked as a DevOps solution architect at IBM. Prior to that he served 8 years in the US Army as a secure network engineer. He is currently finishing his masters in computer science from Georgia Tech.
Tim started by introducing the 3 articles he prepared ahead of this seminar, which covers how to become a DevOps engineer, how to apply DevOps in your IT field daily work and how to apply the knowledge in different fields such as games production. The first section is about Tim’s interaction with ChatGPT and the official definition of DevOps as well as his own path learning to become and working as an infrastructure engineer. The steps to become a DevOps engineer include learning a programming language, learning about version control, configuration management, learn about containerization, cloud computing, monitoring and logging and networking. Besides technical skills, it’s also very important to develop strong communication and collaboration skills. Tim also gave some recommendations for learning resources to become a DevOps engineer, such as online resources from Udemy, Coursear, edX, Books such as The Phoenix Project, and the DevOps Handbook. There are Conferences and meetups you can consider participating as well, such as DevOps World and DevOps days. In the second section, Tim introduced the several stages in the infrastructure field and the skillsets required in each stage. In section 3, Tim gives some homework to encourage the audience to apply the knowledge they learned today and the homework projects will help the audience to gain some hands-on experience and add some projects in their resume. There are also some games Tim created with DevOps engineering, which is pretty cool.
Here are the reading materials
Part1: https://allent13.medium.com/intro-to-devops-part-1-f9463ee854e7
Part2:https://allent13.medium.com/intro-to-devops-part-2-e5f6f0489a1
Part3: https://allent13.medium.com/intro-to-devops-part-3-855f1c707be6
More than 80 people joined our seminar today and they all engaged in an interactive way. Our speaker Tim encouraged the audience to directly unmute themselves and ask questions as he goes through the presentation. This is the first time we have an interactive seminar like this, which turns out to be a great learning experience for the audience. Tim’s reading materials also allow the audience to spend some time ahead to learn and think about any questions that they have. Overall, our event today turned out to be a successful and exciting learning opportunity for our community. We are glad to help more people get to know DevOps field and consider becoming a DevOps engineer as their career path. Thank you for joining us today and we look forward to seeing you in our future events!
