I had my first computer while I was in grade 7. CRT's, Floppy, CD's and DVD's, 128 MB USB Stick, Dial-up modems and phone hung-ups, I've seen it all. It's nostalgic to remember playing GTA, NBA, Counter-Strike and Dota2. Without these games I would end up maybe doing some BBA, or MBA stuff. That spark I caught in my heart while I was playing games brought me to tech.

Math Anxiety and Efficiency

Although not so good with maths, I managed to train and discipline myself with the backend and building UI's. Which was not any bleeding edge technology but was a valuable skill that the industry demands. I learned some PHP and then javaScript and Dart which enabled me to go full-stack and delight the customer. I was solving problems.

Everything was working fine, there was nobody to review my code, and I then started to question the process. "Is it efficient, is this the best I can do ?" I then started with SOLID principles and reading some of Uncle Bob's books. This is when I realized I had a lot to improve. While my code was solving problems, I started to think about scalability.

Agility

The startup was successful and was increasing head count. Working with more than 20 people was a nightmare. Things slowed down and my productivity instead of being multiplied by 20 was being divided by 20. That's when I started to learn about agile and a lot later I ended up with scrum. The framework was awesome and DevOps culture is incomplete without agility.

AWS

One privilege of working in a startup in the early phase is you and one of the founders are the ones doing everything. We plan we design, we write code, we write tests, we spun servers and set up everything. AWS was one of the only options that one of our initial clients gave us. Right after I used it, I fell in love. For the first few years, I only knew how to launch an EC2 and RDS which my coworker taught me. Later it turned into an elastic beanstalk. I felt empowered. A developer who was limited on localhost was everywhere. He was on the cloud. He could show everyone what he's built.

Cloud was constantly evolving, and I quickly realized that I was using only three services out of so many I saw on the console. I saw an AWS training advertisement some Indian guy was doing and then started looking up the syllabus on his website. Luckily I joined one free course that was offered by AuraEd and they offered me a 50% discount voucher for Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam. I was quite fascinated by the power of the cloud. I learned about a lot of services. Later I prepared for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate for about a month and passed it. Then the streak began. I did SysOps Administrator Associate, Developer Associate and DevOps Professional. By then I'd learned a lot about Developing in the AWS ecosystem, writing Infrastructure as Code and a lot of automation with the systems manager and several Developer tools in the AWS. I enjoyed serverless and it's scalability, and maintainability. I learned to use Elastic Kubernetes Service and orchestrate several monoliths and microservices.

AWS has helped me getting my foot on the Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with robust infrastructure, models and reinforced learning in the AWS Academy. I learned a lot of maths after I got to know about the end result. I was forced to understand the math that went above my head with least effort when. I saw the big picture. My dots were connected.

I've transformed many organizations making the developer's life easier. I advocate for a culture that makes the development team responsible for the code they write from dev, test to the production. They own the code, infrastructure and the service they build. Writing Cloudformation templates and Service Catalogs for non tech people enabled an organization towards the digital transformation they looked for.

Why I moved to Cloud and DevOps

While I was doing good with software development, I asked myself a question

How many applications have you built that scaled to millions and billions of users? How many sustainable businesses have you built? How many patented technologies do you have?

The answer was zero. That's why I had to take a step back and leap towards AWS and DevOps.

I want to be a rockstar CTO. Maybe that's exactly why I'm unsettled. I want to learn a lot of technology. I want to bring radical changes. That's why I need to learn AWS along with multiple other things.

Hopefully, I'll increase the number from zero to one in the coming years. I'm confident being backed by a solid bedrock (AWS)