Career

I’ve been struggling with this ever since I started blogging 2 years ago (can’t believe it’s already been that long). But I’ve finally made the decision: I’m keeping this blog at mischavandenburg.com as a tech and career focused blog where I share technical knowledge and notes, and I’m starting a new personal blog at mischavandenburg.blog. I have fallen in love with blogging. Documenting my own life in writing has become a very therapeutic and valuable experience to me. Even if nobody reads what I put out into the world, it is incredibly satisfying to scroll through your own blog and go back in time to see what I was learning or doing or feeling at that time. ...

As a DevOps Engineer or Cloud Native Engineer, I think it’s important to specialize in one cloud provider in the beginning of your career. Specializing allows you to gain deep knowledge and expertise in the specific tools and services related to that cloud provider, making you a valuable asset to any company using that provider. Although cloud computing is similar in essence no matter which provider you choose, each cloud provider has its own vocabulary and way of structuring things. ...

Next winter I’ll be entering my third year as a DevOps Engineer. When you first break into this field there is an overwhelming amount of things to learn. Frankly, this will always be the case. But I’m reaching a point where I have gained experience with most of the main areas and tooling, and I can start seeing the relations between them and how they compare to one another. Just like any other job or activity, there are things that you like and that suit you well, and there are things that you don’t like. And now the first phases of overwhelm are confidently behind me, I’m starting to learn the things I prefer doing over others. ...

Dopamine Listened to an interesting podcast on Dopamine by Andrew Huberman. I always enjoy his content because he is completely driven by science, not by personal opinion. He is truly objective as far as I can tell. Dopamine is often misunderstood. It is not necessarily associated with good feelings after you pursue an activity. It is more related to motivation to engage in certain behaviours. Rewards Scientists did an experiment where they observed children of kindergarten age, and later reproduced this in adults. The children were monitored during school days, where they had blocks of structured time and free time. During structured time their activities were managed. They had to sing or write, for example. Then they had blocks of free time where they could do whatever activity they liked. ...

Last week I accepted a job offer! I’ve been hired as a DevOps Engineer by Fullstaq. Fullstaq specialises in Kubernetes and Cloud Native, so I’m really happy I could join their team. I’ll be doing projects for a variety of clients, and I think it will be a great place to learn and gain more experience in the Kubernetes and CNCF space. Fullstaq has been delightfully welcoming and great to work with so far. The future looks bright! ...

I’m typing this 30 minutes after I passed my AZ-400 exam. I’m sitting in a lovely cafe on Leidseplein in Amsterdam and feel relieved. Another significant certification bites the dust. This one took about 70 hours of study. I started preparing immediately after passing my AZ-104 exam, which was a good move. The AZ-400 requires you to know many details about Azure services and how to access them. For example, Shared Access Signatures are only used for accessing storage accounts, but they came up quite often as alternative answers to the questions. ...

My friend gave me a nice tip for customizing the readme on my personal GitHub page. I discovered there is a whole world of plugins and customizations out there. I set up this one for my GitHub homepage. It uses a workflow to update the readme in my personal GitHub repo with the most recent posts from this blog, based on the RSS feed. Neat! It was very easy to set up. If you don’t have your own blog, you could configure it with a different RSS feed. Hacker News for example. ...

I came across this little book while doing some research for my Jiro Dreams of Sushi article. While scanning the book’s description, I was intrigued by this sentence: “the happiness of always being busy.” Although I work hard every day, I also enjoy ticking off the last item on my to-do list and enjoying some rest. Is there more happiness in being in constant activity? Ikigai “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” ...

Last week I watched “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” again. It must be the eighth time I revisited this piece of art. I have very little interest in sushi, but there is much more to this documentary. It was first recommended to me by my good friend Anders more than five years ago, but I couldn’t grasp its underlying life lessons the first time around. Even though I couldn’t fully understand the message, I was intrigued by it and kept returning to the documentary. Over the years, I managed to grasp more of its deeper meaning. The documentary is about Jiro: one of the best sushi chefs in the world. His tiny restaurant, located in a subway station, even received a 3 Michelin star rating. So how does a man operating from a subway restaurant become the best in the world? And what can a DevOps Engineer learn from a sushi chef? ...

In this post, I’d like to share the five main reasons why I changed my career to IT in my thirties. Making a career change can be daunting, especially when you are past your twenties, and employers can get more skeptical of hiring and training you. However, when I passed my twenties and became more serious and intentional about my life and career, I decided to take the plunge and hope for the best. These are listed in no particular order. ...