How I became a better backend developer 🧑🏻💻 by transitioning into a DevOps role 🚀

How I became a better backend developer by transitioning into a DevOps role!

While it was risky, it was worth the effort.

Starting point 🎬:

I started as a backend developer and worked on projects which were not very complex. And as usual, after the code changes were done, the DevOps team would deploy it.

It was working fine. Both for me and the client :)

Until another project came up which was complex and involved payments, chats, audio, and video calls, and booking appointments.

The hardships 😓:

When I began to plan the project, I realized these could not be implemented as basic synchronous tasks and needed a proper architecture. I lacked this knowledge and this became a handicap in designing a better system. That's when I reached out to DevOps engineers at our company. 

I got introduced to SNS, SES, SQS, S3, Lambda, and API gateways, and boy it finally felt like a breath of fresh air. But it was equally daunting

1. Running behind the DevOps team even for the simplest things.
2. No idea what is happening behind the scenes.
3. No participation in on-call rotation and outages.
4. Knowledge gap in scaling out the system and monitoring.

I made up my mind to get past these and started with baby steps.

The journey to DevOps world 🚥:

I noticed that whenever a new project was to be deployed on a staging server there were a lot of manual steps, like getting the latest commits, creating apache config files, domain configuration, etc. 

Which led to the idea of a one-click deployment of a react application.

I deployed the application on AWS s3, connected it with CloudFront, and set up a domain.

But then this also required manual efforts. I decided to automate all these resource creations using terraform.

I wrote a terraform script to create:

1. New s3 bucket
2. Cloudfront URL
3. Subdomain for the application. 

And connected it with bitbucket pipelines, to deploy a react application whenever new changes are pushed. 

Pioneering this in the company boosted my confidence.

Parallelly, I started learning AWS services in depth. Being a backend engineer, When I got to know about the AWS services, this opened new horizons for me. I realized how many paths I could take to architect a backend feature. For how lambda could be used to generate invoices in the background, image compression, etc.

The result 🚀:

Becoming a DevOps + backend engineer opened new horizons for me.

1. Real-time performance and monitoring of the system.
2. New ideas every day, backend+devops
3. Overcome the fear of changing things into production and learning the art of breaking the system :-)
4. Know what is happening with your application, when it’s pushed to production. Know the system matrices and how to solve issues.

Within 2 months, I had automated almost all of the company's 40+ applications involving multiple tech stacks, PHP, Nodejs, Python, Golang, ReactJS, NextJs, and other technologies.

Today, if anything goes south with the application, I am no longer feeling clueless. I can check the matrices, debug the resources, check the network calls, check the security, and figure out what is causing it. And believe me, this is quite uplifting.

DevLogs 😍:

If you are here, reading my journey till now all I can say is curiosity can take you places. You should strive to be a better developer.

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