DevOps for me is the working between developers and operations to ensure continual rollout of new releases of software – so going from developers dialling something in sandbox, through to it being rolled out in production without any breaks to ensure that everything’s there for the customer without any downtime.
I got into DevOps as I was originally in software development, and then realised the opportunity to have a broader overview of how software gets rolled out was something that really led me to where I am.
The training bootcamp we took part in at the very start was based in Twickenham, which took everyone, irrelevant of what level you were previously, all up to a point where you would fit into the business. We did some early Linux work, we did some programming – and then we were introduced to some of the tools we would be using such as Jenkins (well, Jenkins was the key one!) to ensure that when we did roll into teams that we would have enough of an understanding to build on.
So when we did finish with the bootcamp, we rolled into educational projects. The skills we had picked up were instantaneously transferrable – there were things that we were doing from day one, that as soon as we sat down in a new project, we were doing same things again. Having that understanding before going into a wider environment, where systems have been in place for years constantly growing and developing – but being able to have that core understanding from the start meant that I was very prepared going in and understanding how it would play out on a much larger scale.
The projects I am working on at the moment are heavily leaned towards Peacock with NBCU. We have being doing a lot of work to understand how the teams that we support are using the cloud, because we need to have cross-cloud functionality, so between AWS and GCP, and then cross-region (so, east and west due to the size of America). So working with teams to understand how they use our services to not only improve them, but to improve our understanding – and then rolling that out into production ready for the launch of Peacock.
I think the culture is the best part about Sky. Everyone is incredibly friendly – I can go to anyone in any department and they’ll be more than happy to help me out. Even if they don’t have time in that moment, they’ll direct me to someone to someone who has, or find time at a later date to pick up where I was. I think that is the best part of it.
The graduate team and last year’s grads are there to help us out. They organise many events, so both building soft skills and building technical skills. Any event that goes on, people are keen to push us into it to make sure we are there and enjoying ourselves, really embracing the culture and we get to know people as well. Who you know is incredibly valuable. If you know someone who can help you out with a project – if you met them once at a breakfast event, then you can go to them and speak with them about anything, which helps you develop further and build contacts.
The support available is everything from day-to-day help – if you’ve got anything larger going on, that can be escalated through line managers, senior levels, all the way through to site reliability engineering. One of the first things when we joined was that they came to say ‘Hi’, introduced themselves, set up Slack channels so that if we had any issues at any stage, we could contact them.
We had tech buddies as well. I knew mine from the intro day we did, which was quite nice – there was someone there that if we had any pressing concerns that didn’t seem high-level, they would definitely be able to answer it.
I really feel like I can be myself at Sky. Everyone is incredibly welcoming. There’s always someone that you have something in common with, so you can really build the level of friendship that I’ve got now within my team – both with grads that I’ve been all the way through bootcamp and projects in, to people in the team I’ve just joined. It’s a really close-knit group and you get along with everyone.
I’d one hundred percent recommend working for Sky to someone. I think it’s a great place to work. The culture itself is incredible. The site itself is fantastic. And just the sense of job satisfaction, seeing the things you’ve worked on going all the way from a sandbox, all the way to production, is incredibly rewarding.
