Restarting with AWS and Kainos: Claudia's tech journey
I started my journey into IT a few years back, when the local university offered a conversion master’s degree for Software Development.
I took a leap of faith from my background in Psychology into the vast world of tech. I loved what I learned, and some time after graduating secured a training role with a small software company. But the pandemic came along, my position was cut, and having learned a less than common coding language, I felt I had gone back to square one.
With some resolve, I joined the AWS re/Start programme with only a vague idea of what the Cloud actually was. Sure, I thought, it would be good to get some training in this technology that was becoming ubiquitous. It never even crossed my mind that it could result in a role at Kainos. I was dumbfounded when I received the offer for a space in the Kainos Platform Academy, and it took a while to sink in.
A Belfast native company with its origin partly in Queen’s University, it is a bit of a legend, and you would hear people talk about it with the highest praises. Having the opportunity to join its ranks was a dream come true.
I started right out of the AWS re/Start programme into the Academy.
My work laptop had arrived a week earlier together with onboarding tasks to give me some time to prepare for the first week. After some days of general company introductions, we jumped right into things.
First, we covered Azure. Having just come from 3 months of AWS training, my head was spinning a bit, but the concepts turned out to be familiar. It was good to hear that both AWS and Azure have their place in Kainos, and that everyone is encouraged to follow the path they prefer.
A week later, we returned to AWS and then moved on to Terraform and container services. I had come across Docker and Kubernetes in my last job as a developer, but they had been set up and were running in the background, while my focus was on the application code. Now I finally learned what they were doing, and it was immensely satisfying to see how the different systems worked together. I slowly began to understand what it meant to be a platform engineer.
Other software tools were completely new to me, like Terraform. It was a great feeling going from knowing almost nothing about infrastructure as code to confidently using it in the final project to deploy a database!
Most of the others in my team had previous experience in some or all of the tools, so being a newbie was quite daunting at times. However, our trainers as well as my fellow team members were always incredibly patient and willing to help. By the end of the Academy, our group had bonded, and it was sad to say goodbye. But it had become clear throughout the weeks that Kainos is a company that values teamwork and compassion very highly, so I have no doubt that I will continue to meet great people in my future projects.