 I'm Olufaster Maja, I'm a technical evangelist in Microsoft, and I'm here to talk about how I survived moving from a regular sysadmin role to a more like DevOps-focused role. So I'm gonna start with my previous experiences in companies, and I was a regular sysadmin. I started working in a networking area, then I realized the salaries in a system administration place is better, so I just moved, played me. And you know, after that I was working as an IT generalist in several companies, and I was doing the firefighting, daily stuff, nothing new, not adding anything at all. Then I started working for a software development company, I'm gonna talk about this in a second, and currently I'm working for Microsoft, which is another software development company. So this first development company I worked for, it has around 100 employees, around 80 of these employees were developers, and I was the only IT person. You can imagine how much fun I had. Being on the call means, you can call me, yeah, sure, of course, so it was horrible. If you haven't watched this, this guy was visiting BBC News TV station for a job interview, and the receptionist made a mistake, and he found himself in a live interview on the TV. So I was feeling just like him in the meetings. So I needed to do something, so the first thing I did was learning the language. So very basics, what's scrum? Sprint, user story, Kanban, maybe you're laughing, hey, you didn't know about Kanban? No, I have no idea. So I learned this to be able to actually have a conversation with the developer guys. Then I realized I need to involve in other stages, otherwise something will happen, and in the final stage they will just ask me, hey, we need to have some servers, and I wouldn't get the chance to say no, and you know by default we love to say no, as CIS admins. So I started to join the data center meetings. It's like five minute meeting, and I'm learning about their daily work, what's coming to my way. Like, oh, this guy is gonna ask about a SQL service, 64 gigabytes of RAM. I need to go to the business people and ask him not to ask me a 64 gigabyte of virtual machines, something like that. And I learned that I need to start a clean page. I put all my prejudice biases out of the door, because we are really human beings, even the developers are human beings, not just CIS admins, really. So after that I joined Microsoft, but I was back then focusing in infrastructure, and I was working with very large customers. One common thing I saw is every company today is a software development company. You know, everybody has an app, and this app is important for the entire company, not just for the departments. And every company has similar problems, like deployment delays, firefighting, feature writing is cumbersome, something like that. So it just started to ring a bell in my mind. After that I moved to DevOps related role in Microsoft, and of course the first question is, okay, cool, what is DevOps? And this is a great question for Family Feud, we ask 100 people, and here are the popular answers, you know, no clear explanation. And as an IT person, as a CIS admin, I hate ambiguity. I want to have a clear definition of what is expected from me. So I was like, oh God, it's really confusing, it's really frustrating, I need to do something about this. So what I did was really simple. I started to read, watch, and listen about DevOps. There's a plethora of resources online. You can just go to websites, listen about what people are doing, enjoy recordings of events like DevOps days, and you can learn a lot. The first thing I learned was very surprising for me because it was about people. It's not something like hardware, servers, you know, blinking lights, it was about communication, which was really hard again for me because by default, VCs admins are introverts. We don't like to have conversations with people like yeah, yeah, sure, wow, wow, wow. And then I learned it's about process. You need to have some kind of process in place, and everybody in the team should know about every step in their process. They don't need to know about the technical details maybe, but they need to know why that step is there so they can understand the reasoning behind it. Tools, they're just tools. I mean, choosing tools for DevOps is not something crucial like, you know, deciding on the operating system or I don't know, virtualization platform, you are really flexible about tools. There are really great tools, lots of them, so you can just think about tools. It's not just DevOps. I was thinking like this, the name is DevOps, right? So it's developers and IT operations. Yay, no, it's not like that. One common example is I cannot get enough of this image. If you don't involve security, for example, in the early stages, they're gonna hate you. You know, the developers and operations, you're gonna be fine, you're gonna be doing your DevOps thing. Security guys are like, ah, no, I don't like these guys. Who is this DevOps thing anyway? And finally, it's continuous. You cannot say, we're done, we're good, project finished. Yay, we are the DevOps company. It's just like this dieting advice, you know. It should be part of your lifestyle. It should, you shouldn't be doing beach party diets every April or May. It should be something like, okay, we will start working, you know, accepting as we have difficulties and here's what we're gonna do. So you need to keep on optimizing things in your company because I am sure we have lots and lots of things back in our systems waiting for us to optimize. Thank you so much.