I spent 20 years in semiconductor engineering.
Good salary. Somewhat stable career, lol. Respected field. Learned a lot. For a long time, that was enough. At some point it stopped being enough — probably further back than I care to admit, but here I am.
It wasn’t a dramatic moment or a single bad day. Just a slow realization that I had spent a long time being good at something I really didn’t want to keep doing.
What I Actually Wanted Link to heading
I wanted to build and run systems. Not just work on something someone else made. Actually build, break, fix. I’ve always been the tinkerer — the software guru on the hardware side.
So I started learning. Quietly at first — Kubernetes, Linux, GitOps, cloud infrastructure. Then it became something else entirely.
The Homelab Link to heading
I built a homelab.
- kubeadm — running a real multi-node Kubernetes cluster, not a managed service
- FluxCD — GitOps-based deployments, everything goes through Git
- Renovate — automated dependency updates with manual PR approval
- Calico — networking
- Cloudflare tunnels — secure external access without punching holes in the firewall
- SOPS — encrypted secrets committed directly to the repo
Self-hosted apps deployed the same way production teams do it. I didn’t build this to put it on a resume. I built it because I couldn’t stop — and honestly, it’s fun.
That’s when I knew something had shifted.
A Different Person Link to heading
I’m not the same person who started this.
I think differently now. I read differently. Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain changed how I take notes, and I take a lot of them. When I see a system now I immediately ask: how is it deployed? How does it recover? What happens when it fails?
Watching a Kubernetes rollout from code I wrote still gets me. 🥹
What DevOps Means to Me Link to heading
DevOps to me isn’t a job title. It’s the intersection of building things and keeping them running — with real ownership over the whole picture. That’s what I’ve been missing for years.
The semiconductor world has brilliant people and genuinely hard problems. It just wasn’t the right fit for where I want to spend the next 20 years.
What’s Next Link to heading
I’m going all in. Certifications, real projects, daily posting, job applications. All of it.
I’m not betting on a trend. I’m betting on myself.
If you’re on a similar path — career change, late start, doing it anyway — follow along. I’ll be posting every day about what I’m building, what I’m learning, and what’s actually working.
First post in a daily series on transitioning from semiconductor engineering to DevOps.