Gratitude for Everyone Who Guided Me A Lot To Become A Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

source: https://unsplash.com/photos/t48eHCSCnds

A. Overview

In order to closing the year of 2022, I think it’s not common to write gratitude post publicly. But after more than 8 years I work as IT Engineer, I think it’s fine to write this kind of post.

Finding a good mentors is really hard. But I got huge chance to meet those wonderful mentors and I successfully learned a lot from them. Both for technical and non-technical skills. I feel that after met with them, what I achieved now is a result from gained insights from multiple mentors.

I never imagined that I become Cloud Infrastructure Engineer for more than 5 years after switched from Backend Engineer. During my college life, I imagined that I might become a Game Developer, Mobile App Developer, Frontend Developer, Machine Learning Engineer even a UI/UX Designer. It’s completely different from what I thought back at that time.

B. My Journey as Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

Basically, I started focusing my specialty as Web Developer (do some backend and frontend in the same time). Then, I worked at a company after graduated from university as Web Developer around 2014. Until I moved out from my first company, I switched to become Backend Engineer fully.

I got the golden chance to switch into Cloud Infrastructure Engineer when I worked at Ebizu Sdn. Bhd. around 2017. At that company, I had privileged to provision AWS resources for data platform development purposes.

Then, I moved again to another company, NiceDay Nederland B.V., as Backend and Infrastructure Engineer. It was double roles. But after one year working dominantly as Backend Engineer, I became Cloud Infrastructure Engineer fully. Finally, this role that suitable for me until now. To be honest, I learned a lot about Cloud Computing and Infrastructure Engineering at NiceDay Nederland B.V. and also learned a lot about Site Reliability Engineering principle like Google Cloud Platform has.

After almost 5 years worked at NiceDay Nederland B.V., I got a golden chance to work with RuangGuru. I think my technical skill has improved a more since joining RuangGuru as Cloud Infrastructure Engineer. From maintaining multiple MySQL Galera Clusters to maintaining Kubernetes deployments and stateful sets in multiple Google Kubernetes Engine clusters. It is really interesting.

C. Who Are They?

I would like to say thank you for my mentors who guided me a lot until I become a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer. There are number of key mentors that I met during at university or workplaces. I had frequent communication and collaboration with them and end up for nurturing and grow my skills.

Here they are:

• Bramandityo Prabowo, I learned a lot about Linux, Python, Django and open source software from him. He was my best mentor ever during my study at the university. In the end, he became my colleagues at workplace. He is also who still suggest me to learn FreeBSD. He is so unique!
• Taufik Sulaeman, I learned a lot about web development by using PHP, CodeIgniter, HTML, Twitter Bootstrap and jQuery. I worked with him in freelance projects and my internship.
• Frendhi Saido, I learned a lot the fundamental of Information Technology. When I was a freshman at my university, he taught me a lot from basic programming and other important IT topics. In the end, he became my colleagues at workplace.
• Rosa Ariani Sukamto, she was my lecturer for multiple algorithm-related courses. I enrolled to her courses such as Algorithm and Programming I, Algorithm and Programing II, Data Structure and Object Oriented Programming. She was mind blowing because encourage her classes to use her competitive programming online tools for mid-test and final test. Even my grade were terrible at that time, I feel that her method works until I jump to real industry which required high programming skills. Sometime, I had a session with her just to discuss about my learning progress or career development. Thanks Bu Rosa!
• Rinaldi Guarsa, he was the key person for connecting me with a lot of seniors at my university that become my colleagues at multiple company. He is also who influenced me a lot to become Software Engineer with high skill set. Then, I met him again as colleague and we were working together as a team. Thank you Rey!
• Raden Sofian, he was a professional whom I met when I was a fresh graduate and attempted to become professional. He was my project manager for building online travel agent web application. He was who guide me to dealing with expectation from management and encourage me to improve my professional skills before I moved out from my first company. He is also an IT Governance expert. In the end, I enrolled for master degree at UNIKOM because I was inspired by him since he was graduated from there too.
• Tajhul Faijin Aliyudin, he was a professional who inspired me a lot. He is expert in end-to-end software engineering with KISS (Keep it Simple and Super) approach. I learned about AWS a lot from him but from software engineer perspective. Basically, I was his team mate.
• Fajri Abdillah, he was a professional who inspired me a lot. He is expert AWS stacks, Terraform and advance open source software. I learned about AWS a lot from him but from cloud infrastructure engineer perspective. Basically, I was his team mate also
• Zaky Rahim, I learned about data engineering a lot from him. Usually we brainstormed together to build efficient data pipeline for ingesting large scale dataset volume. Basically, I was his team mate. But before that, I heard a lot about him from Rinaldi Guarsa during study at university. Also he was trust me a lot for building that data pipeline on top of AWS and it worked really well with other stacks built by the team
• Ricky Hariady, I learned many things from him with almost 5 years and it’s countless. He was my team lead at NiceDay in Cloud Infrastructure Engineering Team. Of course, I learned a lot from him such as Cloud Infrastructure Engineering at OpenStack and GCP, IaaC with Ansible and Terraform, SRE principle, computer networking, automate everything we can, monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana, logging with ELK stack and many more. Not only just technical skills, he encouraged me a lot to learn non-technical skills such as dealing with expectation from other team, prioritize incident / infra ticket requests, try to communicate better, lead small projects along with my team mates, analytical thinking, end-to-end inspection, perform some researches, try to manage our tasks in order to have work-life balance even we worked as infra engineer (If you know what I mean), and many more. Thanks a lot Ricky, your guidances are countless. I hope we could work closely together again someday!
• Pambo Paschalides, I learned a lot from him for System Design and try to present my proposal in “high-level architecture”. Basically, he was my team lead at Backend Engineer Team. Turn out, after I had multiple discussion with him, I could deliver my presentation better. He suggested me to explain something from top to the bottom. From high level diagram to the technical parts underlying the architecture. He is also someone who helped me improve my English to have average skill for communicating with European colleagues. He is really nice guy. Thanks a lot, Pambo!
• Suharto, I learned a lot from him about database engineering. I never have experiences for maintaining multiple MySQL Galera clusters up to more than 40 clusters. But he built that for RuangGuru!. He trusted me a lot to perform database migration for around 15 times in production environment. Both for MySQL Galera Clusters and Redis with master-slave replication approach. The important things that I never imagined before, he assigned me to rebuild Pritunl Enterprise with more security layers that affect hundreds of RuangGuru employee. What a really nice experiences. Thanks for trusting me during my career at RuangGuru, Mas Harto!
• Ronald Dimas, I will never forget this guy. Absolutely!. He is my team mate who become “Onboarding Buddy” when I joined RuangGuru when I was in my probation phase. We discussed a lot for multiple topics such as Elasticsearch, Redis, Kubernetes, MySQL Galera Clusters, Github Action, and many things. Both for project purposes or outside projects. His experience as Data Center Engineer has amazed me. I think he is the real infrastructure engineer because he have experiences for managing physical server and cloud server. Thanks a lot for your help during my career at RuangGuru, Mas Ronald!

D. Key Points

Some lesson learned that I’ve found from my mentors above are:

• trust, they trust me that I will do something better, improved, efficient and effective.
• encourage, they encourage me that even I could learn more for every stuff that I don’t even know before.
• nurturing, they just kept me learn to grow my skills both technical and non-technical year after year until I could grow myself independently.
• keep learning, they become a good mentors because they are never stop learning and always inspire everyone surround them.

Based on my personal experience above as their mentee, I will try to do the same thing but with different approach. I open a mentoring session in ADPList to share my experiences while I am working as Cloud Infrastructure Engineer or working as Software Engineer. Even I am not in senior level, I think every small contribution will paid of as huge impact in the future.

You could visit my ADPList profile here:

Get mentored by Ridwan Fadjar on ADPList

Anyone could book a session in my available time.

E. Closing

Beside those my mentors above, I would like to say thanks also for every team that I become part in it such as:

• POSS UPI (Pemberdayaan Open Source Software UPI)
• OSTRIC (Open Source Research Ilmu Komputer UPI)
• Database System Laboratory Team (Lecturers and Teaching Assistant Team)
• Microsoft Student Partner Team UPI (Rendy, Yusuf, Dicky)
• Data Platform Team at Ebizu Sdn. Bhd. (Tajhul, Fajri, Zaky, Wildan, Doni, Mirza, Nugraha)
• Backend Engineer Team at NiceDay Nederland B.V. (Pambo, Panji, Alam, Jeffry, Betim, Yanti, Maulana, Tatsuya, Ricky)
• Cloud Infrastructure Team at NiceDay Nederland B.V. (Ricky, Maulana, Jeffry, Taufik, Rheza, William)
• Cloud Infrastructure Team at RuangGuru.com (Agastyo Satriaji, Donny, Espin, Yuni, Zulfikar, Rizky)

You guys are awesome! Keep inspiring everyone wherever you are.