A question I hear a lot is “How do I become a DevOps engineer?”

I have two answers to this question.

The first probably isn’t very satisfying:

“DevOps Engineer” is an oxymoron.

DevOps, as a philosophy, is the idea that Development and Operations should work together, in cooperation.

My second answer addresses what I expect most people mean by the question: How can a developer adopt a more DevOps mindset, and possibly even move into operations?

The shortest answer I can offer to this question is: Learn to ship your own code.

To elaborate a bit on that: “DevOps” is about the full application lifecycle, so if you want to improve your DevOps skills, learn to operate in all stages of that lifecycle, not just coding. That means learning to ship your own code, learning to deploy your own code, learning to monitor your own code.