“Now everyone wants to do Frontend, or QA, own Macbooks, spinners and work from the urban cafe. But a rare person wants to become DevOps.”
We continue to talk about people behind products and projects of Innocode. Today, meet Oleksii Donoha — our new DevOps. Even if it’s true and a rare person wants to do what Oleksii does, we are super lucky to now have a team of two professional DevOps, fans of what they do.
Oleksii, you are our new DevOps at Innocode — tell us a bit about your background.
I am originally from Odessa Region, small city with a village-type school… I graduated from Odessa Politechnic University, faculty of Information System Security.
My work background.. When I was a student, I started to work at a University Laboratory of network technologies. In fact my work was to literally lay cables, set up wi-fi at the campus etc.. Soon of course that involved more thought-provoking tasks, but I won’t say it was about cutting edge technology :)
That was what you studied for, right?
Not really. Ideally I would become something like a security officer. Someone who decides which processes to implement to prevent information leakage, so that noone could hack us. That’s ideally. In fact, there was only one guy from our whole faculty, who ended up in that kind of job in a governmental sector.
To my opinion, you can’t grow a security officer from yesterdays schoolboy. 5 years of University studies is just not enough. That comes with years of real practice and you have to learn it all on your own.
Then I worked at a helpdesk, became Perl dev. Our client was so to say TicketCo competitor, but on a US Market. It wasn’t for long, because soon almost the whole team was cut down, and I moved to NOC Support department. That’s something between helpdesk and system administration. That was a 24/7 job, big flow of the projects, and I litarally burnt out (problems with health etc), and the employer did not want to compensate for that. So I left. The knowledge I gained was enough to become DevOps. Searched for DevOps positions in Odessa, Kyiv and Lviv. And found Innocode.
And decided to move to Lviv?
Yep. I just needed to change something — I’ve stayed in Odessa for too long. Nothing was holding me there. All of the Odessa bonuses like the Black Sea, easygoing atmosphere, in fact didn’t turn out to be such for me. It’s South — meaning its constantly hot like hell whole summer through; the Sea — if you work, you literally don’t have time to enjoy it. It’s normal practice that Odessa people go to the Sea only twice a year. Also, I missed the Ukrainian-speaking environment. Though it may sound strange, but lingua franca in Odessa is Russian. Wanna ask a stranger about something? You are most likely to do it in Russian. Around 59–60% of Ukrainian-lang-speakers would talk in Russian in daily life. So, Lviv became a safe haven for me.
What exactly do you do here?
We are two DevOps at Innocode — I work together with Yuriy Padlyak. To say it in a poetic way:
Developers work with the soul of the project. We, DevOps, work with the projects body. We set up environments where code actually launches.
How did you choose your profession?
Well, this profession is most suited to my personality, my character. I’m a “human-sign system”. Meaning, I’m best at interacting with sign systems — computers, machines. I’m introvert, so I knew I would do something with computers/machines from 14–15 years.
Were there any stories from childhood that helped decide? Like, making own laptop from scratch?)
Nope, I had no personal computer for a very long time. Though I pretty well coped with interfaces! I remember when in 2000s we bought a new home TV noone could set up the channels. But I did))))
:)) And now we’ve come to a meme stories!Looks like you’re big fan of them!
LOL)) Yes, I make some memes, but publish them seldom. The audience has hard times understanding my memes)) They are quite specific. You’ve got to be aware of the DevOps stuff.
Whats about hobbies?
Well, I play a little bit on musical instruments, ride a bike a bit. I can’t say that I’m a very active person. I also do not have much energy due problems with the heart. Therefore, music is the most suitable for me.
But you play not only guitar, right?
Bass, electric guitar, drums. But I’m self-taught. It started when at school we formed a band to perform a song on our graduation day) Later at University we had another music band, though didn’t participate in concerts, we had very good times on rehearsals.
At the moment I’m not in a band, and it would be nice to get together with other musicians and create something together. When you are alone it’s harder: first you have to select one idea from 20–25 secondary ideas, train muscle memory and learn to play it, record. It’s like being self-employed: you are the boss to yourself, but sometimes you are a truckdriver who got drunk and let down everyone. I plan to find likeminded people to dedicate more time to it.
Back to DevOps. Is there anything interesting you can share? Any blogs to read?
Well, I don’t read thematic blogs. Currently I’m more into news on Twitter/Facebook. For example, I use Fedora Linux. So I follow them on Twitter, where trained people tweet selected content. So you just read it and don’t have to stick to subjective biases of one person like in blogs.
Another example — there’s a well-known engineer nixCraft , he’s sysadmin, DevOps. But he hates systemd. It’s worth reading his blog, but you’ve got to filter his hating.
Now blogs like Habrahabr lose popularity, and subjective posts are to blame. Also, in Twitter/Facebook it’s easier to share your perspective in the comments and have other people read and evaluate it.
Do you have your own projects?
While I was at the previous job, I started an opensourse project — a tool to extend monitoring system. Wrote in a blog about it, shared the code and now I see people use it — forks, make their own versions. Very exciting.
This tool is written on a speific language?
Most of it is in Python. But DevOps is not about language,but the stack of tools you use. For e.g., now at Innocode we don’t have any limits which lang to use, though we try not to create custom tools. Because everything was created before us — no need to invent a bike.
The whole DevOps topic moves now to abstraction — from specific languages to configurations and integrations. Basically, our task is not to write specific modules, but the configuration to how the modules should work. That’s what mainstream tools push us to do.
For e.g., Ansible is quite popular and they have a playbooks — sequences of actions, performed by very narrowly specialized modules. But we do not write these modules, in playbook we just configure how these modules behave and interact with each other.
Can you suggest something to newbies?
Hmmm.. The current trend is that people rarely come to tech industry wanting to do, what I do.
No one wants to become DevOps?! And you?
I didn’t know what I want until the end of University. I had various skills. But DevOps is about combining all of them — it’s something between development, QA and system administration. For me it’s even not a position. It’s methodology.
What would I suggest to newbies? Not to chase trends.
Now everyone wants to become a frontend dev, or QA, own Macbooks, spinners and work from the urban cafe. But all of these are just attributes of prestige. And you have to remember that a good professional will always have his bread. If you want to be DevOps — certainly you have to know Linux/Unix — how it works and why is it so popular. If developers commonly work with MacOs or Windows on the desktop, in the server world we have Linux. And there’s no place for holy wars — which language/framework/etc is better — in the end if it does its job, than it’s a good tool.
DevOps is about finding minimal optimal way to your goal.
Do you have any challenges now at your work?
Now together with Yura we move to Kubernetes and Containerization. Quite abstract, complex changes. My goal is also to learn Ruby more.
So, in the end, DevOps has to know a particular language?
DevOps has to be aware of how the tools, written on this particular lang work. Both Ruby and Python use different syntax but the similar approach. You have to understand it to know why users can’t get to your website, if something went wrong.
Thanks, Oleksii)
If you want to stay in touch with updates, know more about what our talented people do — follow us here and on Facebook!
Want to become a part of our team? Look, we always have a bunch of vacancies http://bit.ly/2vbFsfV. See you!
