Brady, DevOps Engineer: The Bridge Between Code and Chaos

Brady is a DevOps engineer at a VPN company in Prague, but his path started in restaurant kitchens in Omaha, Nebraska. In this episode of Craft a Path, he walks us through how a tech support gig and a self-taught AWS education turned into a career managing deployments across the globe. We get into what DevOps actually is (and how it differs from regular software engineering), what happens when you accidentally break production and trigger 45 minutes of alerts, how AI is reshaping the role of the engineer, and why moving to Europe completely changed his perspective on work, money, and life.

Sections:

• Intro / warming up
• What Brady does and how he got into tech
• From restaurant work to tech support to freelance coding
• Software engineering vs. DevOps explained
• The two week sprint: planning, firefighting, and documentation
• Strategic vs. tactical work
• A day in the life in Prague
• Remote work vs. return to office
• Perks of the job
• Challenges: people, complexity, and breaking production
• AI in software engineering and how it's changing the role
• The future of the developer role
• Advice for getting into the industry now
• Life as an expat, European salaries, and rethinking what matters