Thank you for sharing.

Our goal with DigitalOcean was always to help more people get involved with technology.

The community team that is one of the pillars of DigitalOcean was built by Etel. She herself went through this transition. She graduated college with a liberal arts degree and was working as a bartender because she couldn't get another job.

I gave her a book on programming and told her that if she figured it out I would figure out a way to get her a job. She indeed did figure it out and when DigitalOcean was able to start hiring, she was the first hire we made.

Initially she worked customer support, and soon after we put her in charge of building "community".

She wrote the first several hundred articles herself. She then went on to build an entire team of writers and editors and community managers. And that team also created amazing events both on a local scale as well as Hacktoberfest.

So many people have been thankful for to us for our articles and resources, but they wouldn't be what they are without people like Etel. It's really an expression of who she is and her beliefs and values as a person.

That's why we want to continue investing in community and ensure that those individual developers just getting started feel like they truly have a home at DigitalOcean. Because those are the very same people that built DigitalOcean in the first place.

I can honestly say that one of the reasons people hop onto DO is due to those amazing tutorials and documentations. I know I was.

It's surprising really that in all the praise I threw to DigitalOcean the awesome documentation and tutorials flew under my radar. That's not to say that I don't value them. Rather the complete opposite. They had become such an integral part of my life when getting my hands wet with a new technology or a tool or setting up any new software or system that I completely forgot that they were something that someone invested a lot of time writing.

I was still in college/starting out then and had never learned that most developers don't document things (let alone write tutorials). I believed there must be internal websites similar to DO's documentation and tutorials in each company and took DO for granted.

It'd be really great if you could share my thoughts about how great and instrumental the documentation and tutorials have been to Etel and the team specially.

Also, have a great weekend.

> I can honestly say that one of the reasons people hop onto DO is due to those amazing tutorials and documentations.

Seconded.

more and more my google searches lead to DO document and tutorials.

I've actually added the site into searches for some things, since the tutorials are usually better. Though some should maybe be updated to current versions now and then, it's still overall much better than the rest of the internet in general.

There is almost always a comprehensive article with good overview covering "How to set up X" on their website so when I see it in the search results that's the first place I choose. Even if I don't use DO for that particular project.

DigitalOcean's tutorials are second to none indeed. It always feels like the writers just know exactly what questions you're having.

And who you are. DO's tutorials are so laser-focused on the correct user persona, it's quite impressive how well they understand me.

Absolutely!

I was in a similar position not too long ago. I had nothing but a liberal arts degree, a miserable first career and a yawning resume gap. I just stumbled into coding and I was completely addicted. After many months cobbling together a frankenstinean tangle of Kubernetes clusters, db instances and even an AI that could write bad limericks, I got a job as a backend engineer. You have to work your tail off in this job but its a life changing opportunity in a field where you get to make things for a living and there's always something new to learn.

Thank you thank you thank you cloud providers for making compute power so cheap. I realize you do it because you know you will eventually make the money back 10000x over when we persuade our bosses to lock in to your ecosystem, but I don't care. (Capitalism is not perfect, but hey, sometimes it can be okay)

DO tutorials are amazing, by the way. I learned so many things from your docs, it shows a lot of hard work by some very talented people.

> I was in a similar position not too long ago. I had nothing but a liberal arts degree, a miserable first career and a yawning resume gap. I just stumbled into coding and I was completely addicted. ... its a life changing opportunity in a field where you get to make things for a living and there's always something new to learn. Thank you thank you thank you cloud providers

Programming in the 2010s and 2020s is kind of like union labor work back in the 1950 and 1960s: not instantaneous riches, but meaningful work that leads to a decent middle to upper class life.

Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries. What is frustrating though is that if the U.S. actually focused on developing its talent, we could maintain the lead for another decade or two longer than if we just sit on our hands. With that extra lead time, we could come up with the next major industry (AI-training? quantum computer programming?), but as it stands now, many other countries will be equally poised to jump on the next opportunity and we'll squander our lead forever.

> Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries.

People have been saying this for like 2 decades now when the magic buzz word then “offshoring” [0]. Offshoring and its cousins still happen as a cost-cutting measure, except not at the scale most people would imagine based on the enormous hype it received from “thought leaders”.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat#Ten_flattene...

> People have been saying this for at like 2 decades now when the magic buzz word was “offshoring” [0]. Offshoring and its cousins still happen as a cost-cutting measure, except not at the scale most people would imagine.

I think it is happening at the scale people imagined. The amount of foreign trade and offshoring that the U.S. is doing with developing countries is multiple orders of magnitude higher than it was in the early 1990s.

That's been the case for nearly two decades though. Outsourcing happens, it can go okay to very badly. Running teams overseas, the communication channels become more important and more limiting at the same time. Trying to run meetings in two hemispheres is not an easy chore and takes a toll. I did it for 8 months and jumped back into development.

I've also seen cases where it clearly wasn't worth it. It just depends on the project, communication and company culture. There's something to be said for walking down a hallway to actually talk to someone.

Of course the disparity north to south is less so, as meetings can be aligned better... such as with say California, Washington, Arizona and Brazil. The fact is, value is value... if you're constantly learning and experimenting, you're ahead of the curve and can deliver value where others don't.

>> Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries. What is frustrating though is that if the U.S. actually focused on developing its talent, we could maintain the lead for another decade or two longer than if we just sit on our hands. With that extra lead time, we could come up with the next major industry (AI-training? quantum computer programming?), but as it stands now, many other countries will be equally poised to jump on the next opportunity and we'll squander our lead forever.

Agreed. I have several (very smart) coworkers in other countries. And our political system is an atrocious thing to watch these days. Whatever happened to compromise?

I don't think anybody really knows for sure what the future holds. The thing is with cloud computing and with the spread of technology into the developing world they will likely be needing engineers too.

Of course that may not happen if the software world is so carved up that all of the business goes to a handful of companies that are employing a fixed number of people and concentrating the gains.

And if Elon Musk has a breakthrough with neuralink, then maybe we'll all be out of a job. Why write code when you can think print('hello world')?

On the other hand, big players can get disrupted, technology can change, and its not like every human being has the capacity/stomach for the abstract problem solving we do day to day.

I've seen programming outsourced before (and I moved out of the US to Europe to get my start in software). However, what people without software experience are likely to miss is that programming is not really the problem in commercial software. Communicating the thing-to-be-made in a way that both management and the programmers are on the same page and keeping that communication open through development so that the right thing gets made is the real challenge (heck, doing this among managers is challenging enough).

Outsourcing can, in some cases, raise additional obstacles to this goal through differences in language and/or culture, and every mistake here adds additional cost to the project. This isn't insurmountable, but usually I don't see this even considered when the question of outsourcing comes up.

That, and the group we outsourced to happened to be in a part of the world that was in the middle of a literal civil war, so staff sometimes couldn't work because staying alive was more important. Being aware of the near-future geopolitical situation of your people is important anywhere, and just kind of happens by osmosis when you're working domestically.

I very much look forward to Neuralink, but as you point out on the following line, this will also not turn non-programmers into programmers because the main hurdle is not knowing the syntax, but formulating thought into a structure that's useful for computers, and it seems most non-programmers do not have the mindset for it. Programmers are people who turn ideas into formal logic. Although some things can be automated there, I personally think the future's still bright for developers with people skills, wherever they may be.

What can I do to stay in demand in this field?

Just continue to ask yourself that question each year

The tutorials are good, but I hope people realize many of them aren't written by employees.

Thanks for taking out the time to share this. Really made my day! DO has one of the best content releated to programming. Keep it up!

Almost the same path for me, DO hits the sweetspot for me in terms of features, and the new offerings are looking very pragmatic and thought-out. Thanks DO, I am defunitely increasing my spend on your product!

Yeah the way I see digital ocean (from when I first saw it years ago) is you can get professional cloud computing with quick spin ups etc. at a reasonable price. The basic stuff you need - a VM which you can run whatever you want on. I am hosting a side project on a $5 droplet it and sometimes I forget I use Digital Ocean (which is a good thing :-). Just bash command to install NodeJS etc. and a single VM but the uptime has been incredible.