2023 Highlights

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Finally, 2023 is over! What a year! One more crazy year, but it was the culmination of many actions I've started previously.

Starting with the fun facts ... this is the post no. 100!

After 9 years of tech blogging in English (I had another 10 in Arabic before that). It should be 108 posts since the plan was to post 1 per month, but I missed some, still not bad!

Top 5 highlights in 2023

1. Career

Image by vectorjuice on Freepik

In 2022, I formed the Distribution team at Camunda which is responsible for building and deploying the Camunda Platform 8 Self-Managed which is an umbrella Helm chart with 10+ systems. In 2023, the biggest challenge was increasing the team headcount to 4 and building the workflow to handle that!

2. Academia

I've always been into data! So in 2020, I started a part-time master's in Data Engineering at Edinburgh Napier University. After almost 3 years, I was awarded a Master of Science with Distinction in Data Engineering 🎉. In June, I got the result after I successfully defended my dissertation titled Modern Data Platform with DataOps, Kubernetes, and Cloud-Native Ecosystem. Then in October, I traveled to Scotland to attend the graduation ceremony. All I can say today is that it was a great experience by all means! (and that's actually why I had some unusual gaps in blog posts in 2023 because I was working on the master's thesis).

3. Mentorship

In the last 5 years, I mentored many people in different career stages (starting their first job, career shift, moving to another work style or company). Almost every day, I see people struggling on their way to the DevOps field. I already wrote why the DevOps linear roadmaps are broken by default! So I decided to fix that and launched a Dynamic DevOps Roadmap to become a DevOps Engineer which under the DevOps Hive identity! The nice thing that I saw many people already like the idea and want to do it that way!

ℹ️ Check out the Dynamic Roadmap content ℹ️

4. Public Speaking

Jobstack is one of my favorite tech events all the time! And as usual, this year was awesome! As a speaker, I had 2 sessions, and as an attendee, I enjoyed many sessions on different topics.

• Platform Engineering: Manage your infrastructure using Kubernetes and Crossplane
• DevOps is not only a culture.

5. Activities

Besides these highlights, I had some nice stuff during the year. For example:

• Developed 2 Kustomize plugins in Golang which are Merger (a schemaless strategic merge plugin) and KubeconformValidator (A plugin built around Kubeconform to validate manifests schema within Kusomize).
• Developed ASDF Plugin Manager, a plugin manager for the asdf version manager!
• Like Kustomize Awesome list, I've created Crossplane Awesome list too!

And since we are on this topic, here are the top 5 visited blog posts in 2023!

Top 5 posts in 2023

1. 2 ways to route Ingress traffic across namespaces - Kubernetes
2. Validate, format, lint, secure, and test Terraform IaC - CI/CD
3. Your DevOps learning roadmap is broken! - Career
4. Delete a manifest from Kustomize base - Kubernetes
5. 3 ways to customize off-the-shelf Helm charts with Kustomize - Kubernetes

The same as last year, 2022, Kustomize posts are still in the top; that's because there is not much content about it even though it's built-in kubectl now! (since v1.14). That's why I created a Kustomize Awesome list, which is a curated and collaborative list of awesome Kustomize resources.

But this year, 2023, for the first time, a blog post posted in the same year appears in the top 5 posts! Which is discussing how the linear DevOps learning roadmap is broken by default! That's why I had a follow-up post showing the solution that suggests a better way to Become a DevOps Engineer with the Dynamic DevOps Roadmap. ⭐

What's next?

As usual, I don't plan the whole year in advance, I just put some high-level directions then work on them as I go in Agile iterative style (yes, I use Agile for personal goals too).

What I know already is that I need to reward myself and take a good break after the master 😁

Also, I want to put more effort to grow the DevOps Hive community to help more people to land their first DevOps Engineer role!

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Enjoy, and looking forward to 2024!

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Become a DevOps Engineer with the Dynamic DevOps Roadmap - Career

A couple of months ago, I discussed why all linear DevOps learning roadmaps are broken by default (like roadmap.sh/devops)! In that post, I've discussed the issue, where it comes from, and the solution I tried for over 5 years!

The solution is simply switching to an MVP-style learning roadmap where you learn in iterations and touch multiple parts simultaneously (not necessarily equally). Each iteration should focus on a primary topic while exploring related side topics. So after a month, you already know about each topic in the roadmap, and after the 2nd month, you have the basics, and after the 3rd month, you have a good base, and so on.

Based on my mentorship experience in the last 5 years, I've concluded that any "tool-based" approach to deal with DevOps will fail miserably. The Cloud-Native landscape is getting bigger and bigger every day, and there is no way to deal with it that way.

For that reason, I've reviewed all docs from the previous mentorship docs I held in the past (I worked with people starting their first job, career shift, or moving to another work style or company) and built the ultimate missing solution!

⭐ Check out the Dynamic Roadmap content ⭐

This roadmap is polymorphic, which means it's designed to work in different modes. It depends on how fast you want to go.

1. Self-Learning Course: In this mode, you are not expected to have DevOps experience, and you want to go from zero to hero, transforming your knowledge to land your first job as a DevOps Engineer.
2. Hands-on Project: In this mode, you have some experience with DevOps (usually between 1-2 years of work experience), but you want to step up your skills with real hands-on industry-grad projects to learn DevOps in a pragmatic manner.
3. Mentorship Program: In this mode, the previous two modes are covered (that means it could be only for the project or the whole roadmap) but with support from a mentor! The project will provide you with a DevOps expert who will guide you in following up on your progress and personalizing your learning plan.

The whole idea is about the Learning by Doing method (aka Problem-based Learning), which is done in iterative phases where you learn as you go and cover the whole DevOps cycle like Code, Containers, Testing, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Observability, and Infrastructure.

The project is a work in progress; more details are in the status section.

I hope that the project helps more people start their DevOps engineering careers! The market is thirsty for it already!

⭐ Check out the Dynamic Roadmap content ⭐

Happy DevOps-ing :-)

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