The Non-Traditional Path to DevOps Engineering

I didn’t go to university for computer science. I didn’t start coding at 12. I was a Twitch streamer who woke up one morning and realized this wasn’t going to be my life in 10 years.

That realization led to a traineeship, a 2-hour train ride, a server room I’d never seen before, and eventually a career in cloud infrastructure. Here’s how that actually happened.

The Hospitality Years

Before any of this, I worked in hospitality. Bars, restaurants, and eventually my own sandwich shop. My job was making food, managing stock, handling customers, and fixing everything that broke. The espresso machine, the cash register, the walk-in fridge, the ordering system.

Nobody tells you this, but running a small food business is operations engineering with worse hours. You’re managing inventory (capacity planning), handling peak load (lunch rush), maintaining equipment (infrastructure), and dealing with angry customers (incident response).

When the espresso machine broke, I didn’t call someone. I opened it up, figured out how it worked, and fixed it. When the POS system crashed, I Googled the error message, found a forum post from 2014, and followed the instructions. That’s troubleshooting. I just didn’t know it had a name yet.

The Twitch Years

After hospitality I became a full-time Twitch streamer. It started as a joke. My friends stopped gaming and I needed people to play with. So I started streaming to find them. That got out of hand. What began as looking for gaming buddies turned into four years of full-time streaming, with all the ups and downs that come with it. It was fun, it paid the bills, and I learned a lot about building an audience, consistency, and performing under pressure while strangers judge you in real-time. That last skill turns out to be excellent preparation for standup meetings.

But after four years, I woke up one morning and asked myself: do I see myself doing this in 10 years? The answer was no. And once you know the answer is no, you can’t un-know it.

The Failed Side Quest

Before I fully committed to leaving streaming, I had a brief detour into recruitment. I thought it might be interesting.

It was not interesting. Sorry to any recruiters reading this, but that job was not for me. What it did give me, though, was a front-row seat to the tech job market. I saw what companies were hiring for, what skills were in demand, and I discovered that traineeships existed. That knowledge turned out to be more valuable than the job itself.

The Traineeship

With streaming behind me and recruitment firmly crossed off the list, I started applying for jobs. And got rejected. Everywhere. After four years of streaming, I didn’t have a “normal” work history, and most employers didn’t know what to do with that.

Then I found a vacancy for an IT traineeship. I applied on a gamble, not expecting much. I got in. There was one surprise: I thought the traineeship was in Den Bosch. After I was accepted, I found out it was actually in Amsterdam. Two hours by train. Each way. The training days were on Saturday mornings, which meant catching the first train of the day to arrive on time.

I could have said no. Around the same time, I had an offer from the Dutch railways for a new position that literally involved opening and closing train doors and watching Netflix for the rest of the shift. That was the entire job description.

The choice was easy. I took the traineeship.

But I made myself a promise: I was starting a new career at 27. Most people in IT had been doing this since they finished school. I was years behind, and I was going to do everything I could to close that gap as fast as possible.

The traineeship had great people and a good trainer who helped us get our first Azure certifications. With my new mindset, I went all in on learning. Every evening, every weekend.

The First Real Job

I didn’t want to sit on a helpdesk longer than I had to. Not because there’s anything wrong with helpdesk work, but because my ambition was elsewhere.

After the first weeks of the traineeship, they started looking for a placement for me. First interview, first offer. And it was close to home. 15 minutes by car, 10 by train and a short walk. After a long time of 2-hour commutes to Amsterdam, that felt like a gift.

I started as a junior system administrator. Here’s the honest truth: I had passed a few Azure certifications during the traineeship, so I knew my way around the Azure portal. But the company I joined hadn’t even requested an Azure tenant yet. And beyond Azure, I knew almost nothing. That’s not a figure of speech. I had never seen a server rack. I didn’t know the most basic principles of IT infrastructure.

My colleague who was assigned to mentor me didn’t know what to do with me at first. I sat in morning standups where people discussed their work and I didn’t understand 10% of the words they were saying. Networking protocols, Group Policy, Active Directory. It was all foreign.

I could have given up. I could have decided this wasn’t for me. But I refused to accept that. I wrote down every term I didn’t understand. Every single one. In the evenings I looked them all up. I watched hundreds of YouTube videos. I read documentation until my eyes hurt.

The Turning Point

For the first few weeks, my work was mostly internal helpdesk tickets. Then a project came up: migrating all company MacBooks to a new MDM system. My mentor didn’t have time for it.

I dove in headfirst. Within a week, I had the entire system properly configured and every employee migrated to the new platform.

That was the moment things changed. My colleague who hadn’t quite seen my value yet took me under his wing after that. He started explaining everything properly, letting me shadow his work, giving me real responsibilities.

For a while, the work was infrastructure fundamentals. Improving the Microsoft Secure Score across the organization. Updating servers and workstations. Reading Tenable scan results and fixing the vulnerabilities. Working with VMware, PRTG, Kandji for the MacBooks. Physical server maintenance, sometimes on weekends.

The Azure Opportunity

Then the thing I’d been waiting for happened: the company decided to move to Azure.

Here’s the beautiful and maybe strange part: nobody in the entire company knew anything about Azure. For me, the guy with a handful of Azure certifications from his traineeship, this was a gap I could fill.

The Mentor Who Changed Everything

This is also when my one of my colleague who did DevOps work started investing serious time in me. He was often still working in the evenings, and he’d let me watch what he was doing. Then he started letting me pick things up myself. For about a year, he basically gave me a free apprenticeship on top of my day job.

That mentorship was the biggest accelerator of my career. Not a course, not a certification, not a YouTube playlist. A person who was good at his job and willing to show me how it worked. He gave me the kickstart from “I manage servers” to “I understand how infrastructure, automation, and deployment fit together.”

If you’re early in your career: find that person. Not everyone has one, and I got lucky. But if you do find someone willing to invest their time in teaching you, that’s worth more than any bootcamp.

Building Everything From Scratch

I got the freedom to build an entire Azure tenant from the ground up. Conditional Access policies, access packages, authorization matrices, CAF management group structures. Migrating on-premise applications to Azure using Infrastructure as Code with Bicep. Building deployment pipelines. Migrating from Bitbucket to Azure DevOps. Giving presentations to explain the new Azure environment to the rest of the company.

I learned an enormous amount during this period. I worked day in, day out. Evenings until 11 or 12 at night, back in the office just after 7 in the morning. It wasn’t sustainable, but it was the period where I went from “junior who doesn’t know what a server rack is” to “the person who built and runs our cloud infrastructure.”

Moving On

After a while, I started feeling like I needed to see other environments. Look into other kitchens, learn how other organizations do things. Consultancy seemed like the right move for that.

Leaving that job was hard. Sometimes I still think about it. But I know it was the right decision. To any former colleagues who might read this someday: thank you for everything you taught me. I wouldn’t be where I am without those years.

What the Non-Traditional Path Gives You

Breadth Over Depth

When you come from a non-traditional background, you’re forced to learn everything because there’s nobody else to hand things off to. You’re the network person, the security person, the cloud person, and the printer person. That breadth is invaluable because it gives you context that specialists lack.

Customer Empathy

Spending years in hospitality taught me something most engineers never learn: the user’s frustration is real, even when the problem is simple. “Have you tried turning it off and on again” might be the correct solution, but saying it like the person is an idiot is a choice.

Resilience

Hospitality teaches you to handle stress, difficult people, and things going wrong constantly. Nothing in IT has been as stressful as a full restaurant with a broken kitchen printer and 30 orders backing up. If you can handle that, you can handle a production outage.

What the Non-Traditional Path Costs You

The Imposter Syndrome Is Real

When your colleagues have computer science degrees and you have a food hygiene certificate, the voice in your head gets loud. “You don’t belong here.” It took years to realize that feeling never fully goes away. It just gets quieter as evidence piles up that you actually can do the job.

The Hiring Filter

Some companies filter on degrees. Some recruiters filter on “years of experience in X” and your Twitch streaming years don’t count. That’s their loss, but it’s still frustrating when you know you can do the job and can’t get past the first screen.

This is partly why I play the certification game. It’s imperfect proof of competence, but it gets you past filters that would otherwise reject you.

Where I Am Now

I’m a Platform & AI Engineer at Cloudchamps. I build Azure landing zones, write Terraform modules, implement security baselines, and build AI agents that argue about cloud costs. I have 14 Microsoft certifications, a portfolio of open-source projects, and a blog where I write opinions nobody asked for.

None of this was part of a plan. All of it was the result of being curious, working harder than everyone expected, and refusing to accept that my background disqualified me from a career in technology.

If you’re reading this from a non-traditional background, wondering if you can make the switch: you can. I was 27 when I started. That’s not old, but it felt like it when everyone around me had been doing this since they were 18. It doesn’t matter. It’s never too late to switch careers. If you’re unhappy where you are, don’t stay there hoping it gets better. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. That’s not a motivational poster quote. It’s what I lived.

The path isn’t straight, it isn’t fast, and it isn’t easy. But the people who take it bring something to the table that no bootcamp or university can teach.

They bring the ability to figure things out when nothing is going according to plan. And in IT, that’s every single day.