Matt, you're awesome and your videos have really got me out of a few tight spots as the sole platform engineer at a geospatial start up. I'm wondering if knowledge of aws, terraform, k8s with a solid grounding in linux + networking is enough? I mainly work with aws infrastructure, lots of terraform and a bunch of linux to glue together ECS, EKS and github actions. I've wondered recently if I should be putting more time and effort properly learning a language like Golang or something? Would be interested in hearing your thoughts, thanks again for all of your videos!
Thanks for the kind words. Before I answer that I have 2 clarifying questions: 1) What is your end goal? More startup work? Run your own show? Start your own startup? Big corporate job with a corner office? 2) What do you enjoy doing better? I know Infrastructure guys that do not love coding and I know code guys that hate to think about infrastructure. I have made my living being the guy that does infrastructure, code, and do the c-suite business all in one. There is a value in being able to be a switch hitter but there is also value in being super niche. Whatever it is you will want to make sure it suite your nature or you are going to hate what you do. Let me know the answer to those 2 and I will give you a more specific answer.
@@Schematical Thanks for the reply. 1. Eventually I would like to move into some kind of consulting role, either within a company or potentially my own - I've only been working in IT for like 6 years, so maybe in another 4/5 years I'll consider this. I'm happy at my current job, but in the future I would like to run my own show, but I'm just happy getting all the experience I can at the moment and at least for the next 5-8 years. 2. I absolutely love working with infrastructure and using terraform, docker, bash scripting and Kubernetes. However, I am interested in not only contributing to some of these projects (open tofu, k8s tooling and other CNCF projects) but potentially creating my own tool/product one day. So with regards to consulting, the future of tech or maybe just becoming a better engineer. Would be interested in hearing your thoughts, thanks for the reply dude.
@@Virgil_Solozzo1923 1) If you are going to consult you need to jump on the amazing work of @TheJonathanStarkShow - jonathanstark.com/ that has been huge. 2) You should start following the #buildinpublic movement. Lots of great resources associated with that for launching your own products. As for purely leaning to program I 100% am for that. Don't get hung up on the specifics of a single language or framework, they come and go. But understanding the concepts associated with writing scalable code is really important. In reality it looks like LLMs will augment our abilities to code and improve our productivity but it is unlikely that people with no coding experience will be able to really interesting and scalable stuff without having a solid fundamental understanding of how code works and how the pieces fit together. TLDR: Yes 100% learn to code, GoLang, NodeJS, Python, all are good options. I will say Node and Go are easier, but Python does some amazing ML stuff. Best of luck!
Matt, you're awesome and your videos have really got me out of a few tight spots as the sole platform engineer at a geospatial start up. I'm wondering if knowledge of aws, terraform, k8s with a solid grounding in linux + networking is enough? I mainly work with aws infrastructure, lots of terraform and a bunch of linux to glue together ECS, EKS and github actions. I've wondered recently if I should be putting more time and effort properly learning a language like Golang or something?
Would be interested in hearing your thoughts, thanks again for all of your videos!
Thanks for the kind words. Before I answer that I have 2 clarifying questions:
1) What is your end goal? More startup work? Run your own show? Start your own startup? Big corporate job with a corner office?
2) What do you enjoy doing better? I know Infrastructure guys that do not love coding and I know code guys that hate to think about infrastructure. I have made my living being the guy that does infrastructure, code, and do the c-suite business all in one. There is a value in being able to be a switch hitter but there is also value in being super niche. Whatever it is you will want to make sure it suite your nature or you are going to hate what you do.
Let me know the answer to those 2 and I will give you a more specific answer.
@@Schematical Thanks for the reply.
1. Eventually I would like to move into some kind of consulting role, either within a company or potentially my own - I've only been working in IT for like 6 years, so maybe in another 4/5 years I'll consider this. I'm happy at my current job, but in the future I would like to run my own show, but I'm just happy getting all the experience I can at the moment and at least for the next 5-8 years.
2. I absolutely love working with infrastructure and using terraform, docker, bash scripting and Kubernetes. However, I am interested in not only contributing to some of these projects (open tofu, k8s tooling and other CNCF projects) but potentially creating my own tool/product one day.
So with regards to consulting, the future of tech or maybe just becoming a better engineer. Would be interested in hearing your thoughts, thanks for the reply dude.
@@Virgil_Solozzo1923
1) If you are going to consult you need to jump on the amazing work of @TheJonathanStarkShow - jonathanstark.com/ that has been huge.
2) You should start following the #buildinpublic movement. Lots of great resources associated with that for launching your own products.
As for purely leaning to program I 100% am for that. Don't get hung up on the specifics of a single language or framework, they come and go. But understanding the concepts associated with writing scalable code is really important. In reality it looks like LLMs will augment our abilities to code and improve our productivity but it is unlikely that people with no coding experience will be able to really interesting and scalable stuff without having a solid fundamental understanding of how code works and how the pieces fit together.
TLDR: Yes 100% learn to code, GoLang, NodeJS, Python, all are good options. I will say Node and Go are easier, but Python does some amazing ML stuff.
Best of luck!
@@Schematical thanks so much for the advice man.
@@Virgil_Solozzo1923 Anytime