For a while now I've been turning down invitations to join new projects. I've also got a handful of my own sitting unfinished, things I was excited about a few months ago that I haven't opened in weeks. That would normally bother me. Right now it doesn't, because it's deliberate.
Coding has never been the part of this field that pulled me in. I'm good enough at it, I have to be, but it's never been the thing I reach for on a free evening. What's actually been pulling me in is everything around the code: how it gets built, shipped, kept alive, and recovered when something breaks. Cloud and DevOps. So I made a decision that felt a little uncomfortable at first: stop producing new things for a while, and spend that time getting genuinely good at the part of this work I actually care about.
What "practicing DevOps" turned out to mean
I didn't have a curriculum for this. What I had was a real project, my team's chama savings-group app, and a role, DevOps lead, that came with a list of responsibilities I only understood at the level of buzzwords: dev environment, CI/CD, cloud deployment, database hosting, monitoring, backups. So practice, for me, ended up looking like actually doing each of those, slowly, on a codebase I didn't fully control, with a team depending on the outcome.
