Starting a New Job

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It has been quite some time since my last post.

The real reason is because I haven’t been working in a DevOps role. I originally started this newsletter to discuss my learnings in DevOps. However, for the past year and a half, I have been working strictly as a backend engineer in TypeScript.

Throughout that time, I learned a lot. However, I felt that an important set of skills that I already had were degrading slowly. I wasn’t using my skills in the following domains:

• Jenkins

• Kubernetes

• Terraform

• And more…

I really loved working in these domains, so I knew it was time to make a change.

Ultimately, I found a new role in DevOps. I’m working specifically on the build side mainly because of my extensive experience in development. I prefer this side since I don’t want to be on call like the SRE folks are. I also thoroughly enjoy coding. 🙂 

But to be honest…

Starting a new role is always tough.

There’s a period of learning, no matter how skilled you are. You need to understand how things are currently done and ask a few questions:

• What areas need improvement?

• What systems are in place, which ones are not completely up to speed?

• What are the legacy systems?

• Where are the areas of contention and what breaks most often?

• Who owns what services and resources?

The list goes on.

It can be tough, but it’s always good once you settle in to the new role.

I’m still only a month and a half in, but excited about the new role. There will also be new ideas for me to share here with you all.

Tips for Starting a new Tech Job

As I’ve mentioned, starting a new role can be hard. Here’s a few tips I’d suggest just from my experience in the field. These also are not just for when you get started, but also during the interview process you can ask (some) of these questions.

Find Who are the Key Stakeholders on your Team

Identify who is making the main decisions in the company. Ask them many questions. Book time with them and ask them about their vision. Here’s some example questions you can ask:

• Where do they see you fitting in the company in 6 months or 1 year?

  • This sets the stage for your goals moving forward. Try to mould yourself to be that person in that time frame.

• What are the major pain points that they have?

  • You can use this to create your own tickets in that area. Maybe it’s a codebase with a few bugs, or maybe some automation that is missing (especially in DevOps) that is causing a lot of lost time.

• (DevOps specific) What teams do you interact with the most?

  • This gives you an idea of who you’ll be talking to the most.

  • This also sparks a recursive chain of doing this step. Do the same with the teams mentioned and you’ll create a network of stakeholders who you can get ideas from.

Deep Dive on the Tech Stack

If you’re not the most familiar with the current stack the team is using, deep dive into it.

For me, in this new role, it’s Python and Ansible.

I am not terrible at Python. It’s the first programming language that I learned almost 10 years ago. However, I haven’t written Python in almost 2 years and this team uses it extensively. So I’ve been going deep on Flask & Django to refamiliarize myself with the language.

My last DevOps role underutilized Ansible and this team uses it heavily. I’ve been brushing up on it heavily since I’ve started. This has been the toughest for me because of the lack of use in the past. The great thing about Ansible though is that the documentation is amazing. Since the docs are so good, AI does a great job of explaining how certain nuances of the tool work and how to be productive with it.

Other Things Going On

I’ve been working on many things for a while now.

• I’ve continued to grow Živno.

  • I’ve been adding new blog posts.

  • Added new features.

  • Ran marketing campaigns and learned a lot from that. If it’s something you want to know about, feel free to let me know and I’ll write about it!

  • The great part about this project is that it has sort of “done”, in the sense that the main MVP is good enough for people to pay for it and all I need to do is keep growing the domain ranking, adding blogs, and running ads.

• I built a new SaaS: MavPost

  • It helps you create articles for your business using AI.

  • I mainly made this through the inspiration of a friend (and co-founder) who is a marketing manager. He wanted an easier way to manage multiple brands in one place. It does that.

  • It tailors the results to your business and offers internal linking, external link recommendations, and keyword optimization.

  • Check it out if it fits your needs 😄 

• From the work of MavPost, I’ve been working on a boilerplate that allows you to start a AI SaaS super fast.

  • The goal is to bring everything that I learned from the development of MavPost into a boilerplate so that others don’t need to spend their precious time on implementing auth, billing integrations, and most importantly, AI interfaces.

  • I’ve made it so that you can swap out the model in any request trivially. The interface is the same across all models so you will be able to change on the fly. You could easily build a wrapper for N number of models. Currently Perplexity, Gemini, OpenAI, and DeepSeek models are supported. Streaming, reasoning, and normal chat prompts are all implemented.

  • If this is something you’d be interested in, feel free to reach out for a demo 😄 

• Lastly, I’ve been working on an AI SaaS boilerplate / starter kit. You can check out the landing page here: https://infernios.com

  • After my learnings from MavPost, I wanted to create a boilerplate for myself to build SaaS products based on AI or even just any microservices that use AI.

  • There’s many features built-in already, such as:

    • Google Auth

    • Email/Password auth

    • Stripe payments (in progress)

    • AI features:

      • Support for multiple models within the API call, just specify the model. Supported for:

        • OpenAI

        • Perplexity

        • DeepSeek

        • Gemini

      • Streaming

      • Reasoning

      • Batch calls → Super useful for doing background tasks that will enhance the context in the app. I used it in MavPost for analyzing sitemaps.

    • Postgres DB with Prisma

    • MongoDB (in progress)

  • My aim is to finish this project by end of July, but you can reserve a spot on the site. The pricing is reduced until the release!

  • This will save anyone who picks this up many hours, even with the help of AI, in starting their next project.

Thanks for reading!

I know this issue isn’t technical, but I wanted to share a few quick things to keep you all in the loop.

I hope the tips that I’ve provided for starting a role help you in your next role as well. Have a great week!