DevOps Engineer Review

I thoroughly enjoyed working for MMT Digital as a DevOps Engineer. The environment was very casual and relaxing. Throughout the year, I had attended the weekly Friday treats, many birthday darts and the occasional events. It was a unique experience, and I learnt more than I would at university about the industry and cloud computing in general.

My colleagues has supported me very well, answering questions when I become stuck at certain tasks or if I just wanted to simply learn more. They would explain how some project worked and what area of the project I should focus on to complete my tasks, providing suggestions on using tools or methods.

My supervisor has always remained available when I needed more support and guidance. He had provided me with suggestions to improve myself further, giving me advice on what sort of training I should take to build more knowledge. However it has always been positive and he has commended me for completing my training more quicker than the team expected, considering I was their first placement student in the department.

On Sprints, where we have big projects to complete by a certain deadline would be the busiest and I liked coming home after a busy day at work and knowing there is still more to do the following day. However there was times where some parts of the projects is blocked due to delays that is out of our hands, during those times I like to make much use of it via training, learning more about DevOps and Cloud Computer, shadowing my colleagues.

I was given enough responsibility to carry out the tasks and make my own decision when it came to deploying new scripts and services to different environment or when the tasks becomes more difficult to complete with delays or blocks. However as I was a placement student, I had to keep my team in the loop and ask for advice when I'm about to critical tasks that could affect the client's servers.

All the skills and training that I have learnt and developed over the year will most certainly help me plan better for my final year, development project. It has also sharped my focus for my future career, now that I know I can do well working in this growing industry market that will only expand in the future.

Relaxing, and casual. It was a far better experience than I have expected, and I was very comfortable working among the team. As I said before, there was plenty of birthday darts, weekly Friday treats and the occasional events.

Considering I was the first placement student, the whole placement was very well organised and all the training that was required was all in one place, the trello board. I found the training very straightforward and it has introduced to me the concepts of cloud computing and how DevOps work. The initial 2 days was spent learning more about the company and meeting different people across different departments, and there was a team building exercise with the rest of the new placement student that was being onboarded as well

They have provided me multiple options of developing myself, which I did when I got my first certificate, completing the essentials for DevOps. They have also provided my own space on azure cloud where I can freely experiment different methods of deployment and configuration. If I needed any more equipment to do my work, I can easily just send an email to the IT where they will provide me the equipment that I need.

In my department that I worked in, they did say that the department will soon expand and grow with coup with the increasing demands as more clients starts to move from onsite servers to the cloud since the flexibility and only paying for what you use is a powerful incentive to the clients. However I want to continue to challenge myself and work in a different environment so I can prove myself and work in a location that suits my needs better

I have made friends among the placement group I was joined with, albeit we worked in different department, I had the chance to work with them directly when I decided to transition between departments to gain more experience in web development. I will miss the occasional banter between them.

I was living in a flat to myself, walking distance to work which benefitted me greatly in terms of travel as I can easily just pop into the village for lunch or back to my house to get something I forgot. However the area I was living in was not the best place to socialise as most of the population is either elderly or school pupils. The cost overall was very cheap, with no need to worry about the bus fares, and I can get 10% off from my local co-op shop

The nightlife was non-existent as most of the shops closes by 10pm and there was no nightclubs since it was just a small village however for me that was not much of a concern as I do enjoy playing computers games on my desktop.

In terms of activities, there was fund-raising events that we had throughout the year such as coffee morning for macmillan, and the brave the shave from one of the placement student that was also for macmillan. However I didn't see much of the options outside of charitable activities.