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I'm Tony rib uh I don't really have a
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catch title for this but when I
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graduated from a coding school in Denver
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uh about eight years ago I had no idea
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what an infrastructure engineer was um
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so I thought it'd be interesting to talk
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about sort of a different career path
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you could take in the software
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space uh so this is a brief background
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of what I've done since I graduated
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touring just to sort of give you an idea
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of when I actually got into
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infrastructure engineering um and it's
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not a talk about me but if you do want
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to hear about my history at all I have
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spoken this meet up once before but I
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did a podcast uh with the coding tool
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that I went to that has a link there
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that I can post
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later so uh historically I feel like we
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talk a lot about frontend and backend
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engineering programs which are sort of
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the biggest buckets of software
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developers however there's an entire
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ecosystem that's actually surrounding
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these two functions that make up the
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full like cohesive software engineering
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team and if you work at a small startup
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that's just deploying to something like
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Heroku you may not have an
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infrastructure team but as your company
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gets bigger it kind of becomes a
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necessity over time so this isn't an
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exhaustive list like for all these
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pieces or even all the pieces that make
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up a full software development team um
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but I'm going to focus on the
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infrastructure part because I found it's
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a really fun job and one that isn't
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talked about a
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done so uh as a product developer which
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encompasses sort of the back end and
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front end engineering pieces here uh
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you've completed your application so now
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what do you do with it that code has to
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be built and package in some way so that
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it can eventually run with all
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pendencies on a production environment
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and then because he wrote some excellent
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tests those need to actually be run
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somewhere and there's probably some
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other important checks that you want
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running like linting and whatnot before
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you actually want to go deploy this
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code So speaking of deploy there's a ton
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of tools out there that you can make
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sure your code gets to the right place
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on time and where is that right place uh
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kubernetes is obviously the big sort of
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thing these days and there's an entire
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ecosystem of things just related to
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kubernetes but you might be doing
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something as simple as just running it
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on a static ec2 instance in
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AWS uh and once your code's deployed you
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have to actually store your customer's
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data somewhere so you're likely looking
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at some type of managed database
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solution in order to handle that and
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there's a whole bunch of other things
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that are actually involved in running
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your application uh if you need to do
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something like generate invoices for
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your customers and have PDFs that need
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to upload and download you might need
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something like S3 for that need routing
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to figure out how one part of your
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application is going to talk to a
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different part of your application you
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might need something like terraform so
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that you can have all your
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infrastructure actually L this code
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somewhere just like your application
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code
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does uh so at some point too you are
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going to mess up production it happens
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to all of us it's almost right a passage
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as a developer uh so you better have
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some monitoring Tools in place and some
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way to page the people who are on call
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so that they can come fix it in the
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middle of the night here so if you
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haven't guessed it already that all of
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that is infrastructure engineering um
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it's a ton of stuff and there's a lot of
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different system that you need to learn
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about and way less documentation that
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you're going to find about uh if you
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Google like a ruby or JavaScript problem
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and also we end out having to get in the
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application code most of the time to
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make small changes here and there for
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things so you kind of have to do that
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part
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too so even though this is a whole lot
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of things you have to learn uh there is
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something scarier flash a little more
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fun in my opinion too that not only do
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you have access to all of these systems
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that other developers may not actually
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have access to you have full admin
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access to them which I think of as God
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mode uh if I wanted to drop tables on
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Productions or delete our entire
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production deployment with one command I
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could go do that at my work right now um
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so it's a little scary but also like I
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get to play around deeply in our systems
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in ways that most other developers are
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not even allowed to for security reasons
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so it's kind of cool to actually like
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have that thrust from your engineering
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team that yes you can go do anything but
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obviously you're not going to go do all
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the bad things um which brings me to
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another big difference between being an
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infrastructure engineer and a product
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developer uh which is well your job as a
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product developer is to make a product
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that customers love and want to use and
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they're super happy that youve release
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this new feature to them my job is
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generally to modify the underlying
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systems in such a way that nobody
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actually notices I did anything at all
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um so it is a lot of upgrades and like
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re architectures and fullscale migrating
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applications from one system to another
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databases from one place to another and
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the last thing that I actually want to
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do is cause downtime or drop critical
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data for
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anyone so why do you want this big kind
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of scary job where you have to learn a
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whole bunch of different things uh if
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you like learning this is a great job to
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be in it's basically always full of
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challenges and you're always learning
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something new so if you're bored of
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writing your like 50th rails controller
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or react container this might be a good
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thing to consider secondly your
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customers are your fellow developers at
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your company so if you like those people
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you basically have a job that's making
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their lives easier on a day-to-day
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basis also kind of a special py job uh
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there are less people who want to do it
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which means you're also competing with
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less people for this job which also
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means you generally get paid higher than
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other development jobs because it's
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harder for them to find
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people and even though that's like a
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giant list of things that I work on as
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an infrastructure engineer you do still
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get to pick your faculty right like
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nobody I've met that's working this job
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is amazing at every single thing that's
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on that list uh people sort of naturally
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gravitate to certain things and when you
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put an infrastructure team together the
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managers are often trying to pick people
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of various Specialties to all kind of
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work together so uh as I got introdu as
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mind are kind of like database
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performance kubernetes and honestly
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observability as a thing uh I personally
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suck at networking but that's okay
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because other people on my team are good
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at it and I can just go to them when I'm
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inevitably stuck on
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something so how do you get into
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infrastructure engineering if all you've
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been taught is Ruby or Java or
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JavaScript or some other language um
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just go befriend your infra or devops
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Engineers ask them if next time there's
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an outage that you can go Shadow them or
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just ask them if you can Shadow them on
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a random day and just sort of see what
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it is that they work on um I ended out
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getting into it because I did a rotation
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onto the team and just never went back
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so that can be a possibility sometimes
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too uh but I it's always good to just go
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get involved and sort of see what's
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going on with your application outside
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of the normal code that you're writing
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on a day-to-day basis so I can leave you
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with one thing it's that in for
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engineering is awesome and everybody
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should try a little bit and that's it
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that's the whole talk
