In 2021 I had reached a certain stage in my life where I had the liberty to make a choice. I was 31 years old and had just finished an important chapter of my life, and was ready to begin a new one. After thinking about where I wanted to steer my professional career, I decided to follow my passion for programming and automation and attempt to make a career out of my interests in tech and IT.
I was in a fortunate situation, because there were large shortages of people on the IT job market in The Netherlands. Consequently, employers were much more willing to train their employees to perform the roles that they required to fulfill.
Bots and Scripts
I have always loved messing around with computers, and I learned to write small and simple programs at a very young age. At the same time I was an avid gamer, and spent many hours slaying monsters in online RPG’s. One day I came across the concept of a bot: a program that plays the computer game for you, and I was hooked. This is where I developed my ‘fetish’ for automation.
I was very lucky that I had a friend who shared my interests, and together we built our own automation projects (called ‘botfarms’) in which we ran large amounts of bots that played a certain game for us. This army of bots generated in-game currency which we could sell for actual money. They weren’t huge profits, but it was an amazingly satisfying feeling to be the overlords of an army of automations that actually generated some income for us.
From Bots to DevOps
These botfarms were hosted on servers which set up ourselves. In order to save costs we rented Linux servers, and I spent many evenings figuring out how configure them via the command line. Often I would suddenly snap out of my flow at 3am and realise I had to go to work at 7 in the morning again.
Although I did not manage to make these personal interests into a personal career, my friend eventually became a Data Engineer. After making the decision to make a career switch to IT I needed to figure out which direction I wanted to go in, because IT covers a very broad range of topics and skills. Based on on our shared interests and previous projects, he recommended me to become a DevOps Engineer.
I very quickly realised that he was right on the money with his suggestion and I started to become very enthusiastic to learn how to make a living by working with computers and automation.
Traineeship
As I mentioned before, employers in The Netherlands are now willing to train potential candidates, and I used my hobby projects as a way to demonstrate my genuine interest and affinity with IT and automation. I was offered a traineeship to become a DevOps Engineer in 2021. After a period of training I started working for the City of Amsterdam and I’ve been part of an IT4IT operations team since.