My first ever interaction with the SRE world: MLH Production Engineer Fellowship

During the summer of 2023 I had the opportunity to be part of the MLH Production Engineer Fellowship, before this I had really no idea what a production engineer was (nor site reliability engineer). But what I can tell is that this opportunity changed my perspective on software engineering in general and in there I discovered that maybe this is what I wanted to do for my career. And in here I wanted to share my experience and what I learned during this fellowship.

Major League Hacking PE Summer Batch 2023

Decoding Production Engineering

So, from what I learned at the time, we can say that PE/SRE is this cool mix of software engineering, systems, network, observability and overall reliability of a system. I think that the fact that this role is a mix of different areas of software engineering is what attracted me the most, because I like to learn about different areas of software engineering and this role allows me to do that.

And I think what really got me really excited and to think this type of role as a career path was the fact that I talked with really talented engineers from Meta and every time I talked with them they really seem proud and excited about what they do, and they were super knowledgeable about the different areas of software engineering that they work with, and the fact that they were really kind to share their knowledge and experience with me made me really excited about this type of role.

During th felowship we had different sections in which we learned about different tooling that production engineers use, and it was all part of creating a personal portfolio project to take a look at how it will all work out. We learned about docker, nginx, github actions, grafana, prometheus and a couple more. And at the end we deployed our project to a DigitalOcean droplet so that we could get a feel on how it is to manage a server which is part of this role. And although it was a really small project, I think it was a really good experience to get a feel on how it is to manage a server and the different tooling that is used in this role.

That project got me going with linux, and after a talk with one of our mentors during the fellowship, I really started to lean into learning linux, and without a second thought I bought a thinkpad and installed ubuntu which is the OS that I used for the rest of college and I also bought the book "UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook", with this combination I really started to learn linux and I think it was a good decision because now that I work on any project I feel comfortable with going into a terminal and doing whatever I need to do, and I think that is a really good skill to have as a software engineer in general.

Learn more about the MLH Fellowship here.