What’s the best way to get a job? Show someone with a job to do that you can do the job within their iron triangle. What’s the best way you can show someone you can handle a complicated k8s deployment, with 7 different CNCF-approved add-ons, zero-downtime rollouts and a whole bunch of YAML files? Probably by competently and publicly running your own complicated k8s infrastructure.

Self-hosters remind me a lot of the sysadmins of yore, who mostly ended up in the profession because they just couldn’t help but mess around with their underlying computing machine until they knew all kinds of weird nooks and crannies within it. I trace my own lineage in software deveopment back to the day my parents finally purchased a Dell laptop and a 300 Kbps Internet connection (residential wiring in Boston left something to be desired), and promptly broke the Windows registry and installed Ubuntu without them ever realizing anything had changed. The next year I got my first internship through a high school program as a Unix admin intern at Akamai, and the rest is history.

I blanket recommend “install Linux to your bare silicon and figure everything out by experimentation” to anyone interested in getting into the software field. But I especially recommend it for folks who are more interested in the DevOps-y side of things. If your laptop has 8 GB or more of RAM, you have more than enough space to roll out quite complex deployments purely locally – and if you can find a way to credibly signal that to future employers, say by actually running a tiny cool little service atop it they can visit, I think you’ll find an awful lot of interest come your way from people with hard technical problems to solve.

(– Oh, but before you go, let me also make it clear that 99% of IT shops out there are not running complicated k8s deployments with 7 different CNCF-approved add-ons running on top of them. This is also part of the game. A surprising portion of the value of any professional comes from the ability to trust that they

  1. Have the ability to handle uber-complicated problems, if and when they arise, and
  2. Have the wisdom not to actually use them unless they have a good reason to.

If you can tune a Porsche, a lot of people will trust you with their Civic, and that’s still a pretty sweet gig.)