Making Time To Fail In Order To Learn: John Paice on the Journey from vSphere pro to DevOps pro

June 30, 2020 Dormain Drewitz

Tanzu Talk (formerly Pivotal Conversations) · Making Time To Fail In Order To Learn: John Paice on the Journey from vSphere pro to DevOps pro

“Taking a course on Kubernetes is helpful, but it’s also really helpful to just fail at it."

Failing at anything feels uncomfortable. But, as John Paice (@johnny_platform), a platform reliability engineer at DICK's Sporting Goods points notes, failing at something can be the best way to learn it. In this episode, Dormain talks to John about his journey from a HyperV and vSphere expert to one of the founding members of the DICK's Sporting Goods platform engineering team. Along the way, he's had to learn new scripting languages, get familiar with the differences between cloud providers, and strengthen his Linux know-how.

Now what?

Watch John and teammate, Vaseeharan Seevaratnam, present on automating TKGI (formerly known as PKS) at SpringOne Platform 2019.

John mentioned learning Kubernetes. Start with some free, basic courses on KubeAcademy.

Listen to this episode with Neville George about how he made a similar transition in his career. Neither were looking to join the platform team, but both are now excited about their careers.

Check out the Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery guides on the Tanzu Developer portal. John mentions that working with one e-commerce team gave him important exposure to CI/CD before he joined the platform team.

Watch this webinar with John's teammate, Jay Piskorik, and Forrester Research's Chris Gardner on how I&O must evolve their skills and mindset to thrive as a digital business.

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Subscribe to the Tanzu Talk podcast (formerly known as "Pivotal Conversations") on iTunes.

Send feedback to podcasts@pivotal.io.

About the Author

Dormain leads Product Marketing and Content Strategy for VMware Tanzu. Before VMware she was Senior Director of Pivotal Platform Ecosystem, including RabbitMQ, and Customer Marketing. Previously, she was Director of Product Marketing for Mobile and Pivotal Data Suite. Prior to Pivotal, she was Director of Platform Marketing at Riverbed Technology. Prior to Riverbed, she spent over 5 years as a technology investment analyst, closely following enterprise infrastructure software companies and industry trends. Dormain holds a B. A. in History from the University of California at Los Angeles.
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