Full Stack Journey 001: Bart Smith

In this first-ever episode of the Full Stack Journey podcast, I talk with Bart Smith (old GitHub account migrating to new GitHub account, YouTube channel). Bart shares some details about his journey from being a Microsoft-centric infrastructure engineer to what he calls a cloud-native full stack engineer. Below are some notes from our conversation, along with some additional resources Bart wanted to share with readers/listeners. Enjoy! Show Notes * His journey started in June 2014 as a result of the Microsoft announcement regarding support for Linux and Kubernetes on Azure—this really indicated a shift in the industry. * Bart’s view is that a full stack engineer knows about operations, the hardware stack (compute, storage, network), the software (network, operating system, management, logging), and most importantly knows how to “code” an immutable infrastructure. An operations full stack engineer can read code, work with developers, and be part of a DevOps team of support DevOps teams in deploying code into production both to on-premises solutions and off-premises solutions. * IT folks don’t need to be strictly involved in software engineering to benefit from a journey toward a more full stack role. * His journey from Microsoft-centric engineer to cloud-native engineer encompasses learning the following areas: * Getting a good understanding of microservices (recommends book Building Microservices by Sam Newman; here’s a link) * Container technologies (Docker, most notably, but also CoreOSand etcd); recommends this Docker course * PaaS/container orchestration (Mesos/Mesosphere, OpenShift, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes) * AWS (10x the size of all competitors), Joyent * Microsoft and/or VMware, but do not start here (start elsewhere) * Otto and Terraform by Hashicorp * Ansible (not Chef, Puppet, or Salt) * Cassandra and Neo4j * Git * VXLAN * He highly recommends using OS X on Apple hardware (he bought a used MacBook Pro, including SSD, for less than 300 euros). * Safari Books Online (link) a great resource, highly recommended. * Bart believes attending meetups, if available in your area, is a valuable source of information. * Attending relevant conferences, digging into the material, asking questions, and meeting people has also been very helpful. * After attending a meetup or conference, be sure to give yourself a “call to action”—actually do the thing about which you’re learning. * Bart recorded meetups so that he could review them later, multiple times if necessary—“repeat to remember, remember to repeat” has been a key learning strategy for him.