Help engineers transitioning to work on cloud, specifically on AWS
reboot our programming to the cloud era
Welcome to Transitioning to Programming the Cloud by Shuo
Why am I starting this newsletter?
(Image: courtesy to ‘Your Journey to a Cloud Career’ from AWS)
As a hiring manager in my past and current companies, I observed first-hand how challenging it is to source and hire talented engineers who are well-equipped with the cloud 101 and feel comfortable to program on AWS cloud environment. For example, quite some candidates of the DevOps / Cloud Infrastructure engineer position only knows EC2, Dockers, Jenkins pipeline and general automation, where the job functionality needs much wider range of knowledge such VPC, Security Group, IAM and etc.; looking their background, they are great engineers, and I truly believed some of them could easily adapt to the job if the job gives them 3-4 months to adapt — but we could not (and did not) take the risk, neither when I worked in a large corporation and nor in a small startup.
A senior backend engineer I worked with got frustrated multiple times when working on a system that used AWS Cognito (later he appreciated how simple and reliable the design had made our system into, but it took quite a while for him to get to that point).
Looking back to myself, I felt overwhelmed back then when I transitioned from the non-cloud world to the cloud world; but it felt refreshing and huge productivity-boosting — I was not comfortable back then during the transition period though.
Non of the above needs to happen, at all. By smoothly absorbing the seemingly overwhelming cloud technology and map them into the familiar terms we have been working for years, we can easily make the transition process easy and enjoy the extra productivity we gained by this ‘rebooting’.
Hopefully, this newsletter can help someone who really needed / wanted to make the transition — that’s my first reason to start writing this.
At the same time, I also feel this might be a great opportunity for me to know talented engineers during this transition — experienced engineers possessing great foundations will truly be those so called 10x team members once they grasp the new tooling and building blocks — that’s my second reason to start writing this.
Who am I?
I worked on networking, distributed systems when I started my career as all backend engineers back then; then I have been programming on AWS infrastructure in the past 6 years; lately, I fell in loved with serverless stack based solutions in the last 4 years since I personally saw the 10x overall cost reduction when building solutions with this new paradigm.
Who Should Subscribe?
I have first-hand helped people to make successful transition. If any of the following is your situation, I’d love to help and I am sure we can help each other to achieve your specific goal:
If you are an (backend, networking, security) engineer who have been on non-cloud environment and wanted to relate your skills to the ‘cloud’ technology discussions;
If you are an engineer who want / need to make career transition to cloud projects (specifically AWS);
If you are a front-engineer who’d like to discuss / co-design the full stack architecture with your colleagues (to be honest, cloud infrastructure, particularly the serverless paradigm really made such discussion easy and productive);
If you are a backend engineer who’d like to switch to DevOps / infrastructure engineer, or simply wanted to own the overall DevOps / Infrastructure decision;
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In the meantime, tell your friends!