It's been awhile since I've written. Behind the scenes I can almost figure out what I wrote about last. lol Anyway this post is me brainstorming into the ether when I should be sleeping. If you know me irl, I've been struggling lately with trying to figure out how to be a better geranal-ist. I'm not use to not having a specialty and it's very hard for me to be scattered. I really enjoy having a solid lane and sticking to it. As a friend pointed out to me (I said this and kinda forgot) I'm not cut out for programmer interviews anymore. I can do the work but I can't interview for those types of things anymore. The experience never leaves you, but the mindset and "grind" around studying those concepts aren't there. So what do I do about that? I can just lean into SRE more than I have in the past. Nothing wrong with that, but that area is so broad how does one stand out? Being purely an OS SME like redhat is nice, but does it really keep me interested and will it get me to retirement? no. > PS. - my version of retirement is an active retirement. I'm on payroll and get insurance paid for but I'm not required to be at a keyboard all day every day. Ideally I'd say 10hrs, but I'm open to 20-25hrs. lol Anyway as I look through job listings and listen to people talk about the direction of the tech space I think there are 3 things I could focus on within SRE. - pipelines - observability - containers Actually can we back up here. I forgot the book I read, but I reference it all the time. It's about having skills in an I (1 core skill), T (2 core skills), or E (3 core skills) form. I have two schools of thought here. 1. This is a constant cycle in your life/career. You might get to a point that you think your an E, but have pivoted for so long that your back at T or I, and need to build up new complementary knowledge. 2. This is a layered thing. You hit E and then within each segment of skills you start the process back at square 1 (I) and build up to E. Coming full circle, I think that this feels like an option 2 moment for me. At a high level my 3 core skills/sources of knowledge are programing, security, and automation. I took programming as far as I could/wanted to go ending in more of a T than an E. Now that I'm leaning into automation (that's basically how I see SRE/devops now) I need to "establish my dominance" in 3 areas. Well those 3 areas above area honestly my biggest touch points since getting into devops. Pipeline is something I can kinda say I have under control with gitlab. I tried with Jenkins and honestly it didn't make sense to my brain. Find the thing that sticks, get really good at it, and then use it as your baseline understanding for anything else. lol Containers is my next priority. I've slightly kept up with the container world since I left grad school. By 2019 I was hearing a lot about k8s but still didn't make sense to me. Now everything and everyone is moving to containers, container management, and container deployment as a core focus. I get it honestly. It makes everything equal all the time on one playing field. Right now I only know enough to do small things. Within the next 6 months I want to be able to really talk in detail about containers, container security, and container deployment with more confidence. I want to feel like I'm a SME when giving my opinions. Lastly observability. Everyone wants to track events/logs, sort them, and display them in a dashboard. Nothing wrong with that I just don't tend to care about the how. I've always just learned how to use the end product dashboard. I want to change that though. I want to be able to set things up and know the basics of what's needed to get the observability team going. I don't want to have to always wait on a hand before moving on. I just want to be able to say "here is a baseline. Expand as needed". Right now I hear we want metrics and kinda freeze on what the basics of that would be. Since this is "so hard" it will be my last topic to tackle. --- That's for reading this late night brain dump. I appreciate you