Originally published at https://medium.com/@betz.mark/how-i-became-an-sre-and-what-its-like-8315b6eccccf
In twenty-five years as a professional software person I’ve done quite a few things but they have all focused on, or at least started with, writing code. I am basically a programmer. Somewhere along the way, around the 2000’s if I recall, the term “software engineer” became the fashionable title. I always felt a little silly using it because I don’t have a degree in software anything, and my Dad is an actual engineer with stuff hanging on his walls to prove it. I didn’t go to family parties and talk about what an engineer I was. In fact I’m not sure I ever actually had the word “engineer” in my role until now. In this post I’m going to talk a little bit about how that changed.

Back in 2015 I had just finished up a gig writing a specialty search engine from the ground up, working on a two man team with friend and repeat colleague Joey Espinosa. With just two of us working for a somewhat tech-savvy business person that project was hands-on full-stack everything. We did the data layer, scraping engine, customized spiders for horrible ancient broken sites, web layer, networking, admin, everything. We deployed the app in docker containers using custom scaffolding on AWS instances. It was a ton of fun almost all the time, but business-wise it went nowhere.
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