It all started with a thought!!!
I was pretty comfortable in my job. My work was pretty straightforward. I am so grateful to my previous employers, JFrog and Shippable, for allowing me to show the world how a non-technical person can move in this space of DevOps and make an impact. Most of my work revolved around researching various cloud-native technologies, writing about them, and promoting the brand to developers. Since I love writing and storytelling, I started sharing tech stories on LinkedIn and got a great response. As a result, I built a huge DevOps community of 32k professionals through my network.
I was happy doing all that but somewhere felt I was restricting myself when I could give more. I’ve been in the same job for six years. You know that feeling when you enter your thirties and think it’s time to get a little more serious? Yes. I felt this feeling and wanted to break out of my comfort zone. I wanted to take on new challenges and to test myself once again:)
So, one fine day a thought entered my head. It told me to get out of my cocoon. Yes, it all starts with a thought, and at that moment, all the key ingredients came along to help me to make this decision.
Was it hard? Hell yes! Just that thought of getting out of my comfort zone was like..Shhhhhh!!!!!!! But, I decided to go for it and give it a try. What happened next? Read on.
The universe listened
My yoga teacher once told me that if you look for something with good intentions and a pure heart and really want it to happen, the universe listens and responds.
In my case? The universe responded pretty quickly. Ha Ha Ha :)
Well, most of you know that I am very active on LinkedIn, where I share many technical stories. I get a lot of messages every day, and surprisingly one fine day, my profile was viewed by one of the tech leaders. He asked me if I was looking for a change. I was a little skeptical but decided that breaking my comfort zone was necessary.
It was time to challenge myself. I could see all these things coming together to help me here. We (me and that tech leader) met a couple of times on zoom to discuss expectations. They liked my profile, and after some interviews, it was a yes from both sides. Finally, I could see my vision clear.
But, what really made me move?
The team is small but mighty, with outstanding leadership and the company is rising like a rocket. No, I am not kidding. This company had been on my radar for a long time because I had already been following their blog.
I didn’t stop there. Their products, future plans, and the people — Everything was positive.. This was one of those hyper growth companies. What intrigued me the most was that the company had grown very big with very little marketing effort. I could see the magic of genuine products solving real problems that needed no promotion.
Also, the company is recognized as one of the best places to work. The Glassdoor rating is impressive, and the CEO, Jyoti Bansal, has his own fan base because of his successful tech entrepreneurship journey.
Not just one, but a couple of vital points made me take this decision to move forward and take up this role.
I made up my mind to get this thing going — Let’s get in there and enjoy the roller coaster ride. So finally, I joined this company.
The start of something BIG!
Credits: Harness Logo
I joined Harness as a developer advocate. Basically, my job is to help developers through their DevOps journey by suggesting the best DevOps practices, tools, guides, etc. I love to do this. Why? Because it seems like I’ve already been doing this through my daily LinkedIn posts and articles.
To share a secret with you, I am actually an introvert, but since I was always in a marketing kind of role, I made myself comfortable talking to people, giving talks, etc. But thinking back, I’ve always wanted to be a speaker, an educator, sharing knowledge and building communities — I love interacting with people and sharing engineering stories.
On my first day everything went smoothly. My boss welcomed me, and after 2–3 days, he told me to learn how Harness CI/CD works practically so I can give demos. Wait. What? Demos? Me?
What the h@##! I am not that technical; I can talk and write, but demos? No way! — That was my fear talking. But I kept my mouth shut and decided to get my hands dirty. That was my first challenge.
It seriously felt right; this is what I should be doing. So my first task was to learn how Drone CI works from scratch. Why Drone CI? Because Harness acquired Drone in 2020, now it’s a part of the Harness family. And for me, starting with continuous integration seems like the right flow.
My journey to hands-on CI (continuous integration)
Theoretically, I knew what CI is and why companies use it, but I didn’t know practically how it is done. But I felt ready to get my hands dirty. I logged in to my GitHub account and started playing around. I created some repositories to try out some basic things like Git push, Git pull, Git clone, etc. Next, I signed up to Azure and created a virtual machine. I learned how to ssh into a virtual machine, installed Docker, and logged into my Docker Hub account.
In just a week, I was setting up Drone CI server locally and building a basic CI pipelines. I began to see why continuous integration was so powerful. This time, not just the theorybut how companies do it and what they need it for.
So, what exactly is continuous integration?
Time for a small story…
Software development methodologies have come a long way; it all started with the traditional waterfall model where someone collected requirements, someone built the product, the testing team did not know what was going on. Teams worked in silos, and the result was less than optimal.
Then came agile and other lean methodologies that made more sense. As software development evolved, companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon started to build highly scalable software in the cloud. Cloud Computing gave new hope to companies and developers to build a new way. For example, Flickr began to deploy its code into production many times a day, and such examples inspired other companies to speed up their development.
However, as some companies cracked the code, it was still confusing how Dev and Ops work together as they usually form a bottleneck, and hard to convince both parties. The collaboration between these two departments was missing. Dev used to write code and build features.Ops carried things forward to ensure nothing went wrong, such as making sure the website was always available, answering questions, etc.
The whole flow felt broken, and that is when the concept of DevOps entered the game to shift the cultural dilemma. It basically aimed to make things easier for companies by bridging the collaboration gap between Dev and Ops, and unifying everything around these two departments.
When it came to supporting DevOps, concepts like continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment were introduced as part of the DevOps phenomenon to help companies move their features from Dev to production quickly.
Continuous integration is the first step towards automating your software delivery. As the name suggests, it involves integration of work by different developers, where one developer makes changes to his or her code very often and merges it into the main branch, triggering an automated build whenever a code commit happens, and verifies the code works for the tests specified. This helps developers find bugs and errors early in the development pipeline and prevent them from entering the production environment.
A practical CI scenario
Take any company, they will use a source control management tool like Git (yes, I mean GitHub) to help their developers write code, store it, and collaborate to make sure the product is built properly as planned.
As the development team grows, the number of daily commits will increase, and it becomes difficult to find bugs, check software quality, and test. To tackle this, companies turn to continuous integration — when the code merge occurs, it automatically triggers the CI tool and runs tests against the code to find bugs and other issues.
Now, let’s see how it works in practice.
So, What is Drone CI and how does it work?
Written in Go, Drone CI is one of the pioneers in the field of continuous integration. In 2012, Brad Rydzewski started an open-source project called ‘Drone’. The aim of Drone was to empower open-source community and engineers with a self-service CI platform that was container-native and simple to scale. It’s built with container technology and uses containers for everything.
Up next — Setting up Drone server
Drone works best inside VMs, and it provides free cloud-based SaaS at no cost. You don’t have to set up anything from scratch; just start your VM where you hosted your Drone server, and it’s ready to go.
In my next article, I will show you how to set up a Drone server inside your virtual machine.
I am all excited about my journey. It would be amazing if you can play around with Drone CI, Harness continuous integration and Harness continuous delivery and let me know what you think, or have any questions..
Wait for my next blog where I’ll show you how to setup Drone CI from the scratch:)
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