Bootcamps and mentoring

Teaching is the best test of whether I really understand something. Over the years I've taught DevOps and AWS cloud at bootcamps, and mentored interns and junior engineers.

How I teach DevOps

• Start with the why. Nobody cares about a CI pipeline until they've manually deployed something and broken it.
• Let people break things. A safe environment where mistakes are cheap teaches more than any slide.
• One concept at a time. Containers, then orchestration, then pipelines. Stacking everything at once just overwhelms people.

Mentoring juniors

• I try to answer questions with questions first. Where did you look? What do you think is happening?
• I share my own mistakes. It makes it easier for others to admit theirs.
• I celebrate small wins, like a first merged pull request or a first fixed pipeline.

Teaching AWS cloud

For cloud, I start with the building blocks everyone uses: compute with EC2, storage with S3, databases with RDS, and networking with VPCs and security groups. Once those click, services like Lambda, CloudFormation and auto scaling make much more sense. Hands-on labs beat theory every time, and I always show how to keep an eye on costs.

Why I keep doing it

Every time I explain something, I find a gap in my own understanding. Teaching keeps me learning.