the long way to devops

i graduated from KNUST in November 2022 with a degree in metallurgical engineering.

i’d quietly known for years that i wasn’t going to be a metallurgical engineer. through all four years of school there was a parallel curiosity running in the background — about software, about how applications got built, about the engineers shipping the things i used every day. but i never found the balance, or the inspiration, to actually commit. tutorials would come and go. interest came in waves.

then one afternoon i watched my friend Ephraim write code.

Ephraim — a senior software engineer i’ve known and looked up to for a long time — was at his laptop, working. building a product. solving a real problem in real time. i was just sitting there next to him, and something about watching it happen — the focus, the directness of it, the way an idea became a running thing — flipped a switch in my head.

i resolved that day to do this for real. and i haven’t turned back since.

after graduation i was posted back to KNUST as a research assistant — Ghana’s mandatory year of national service. it gave me something i hadn’t had in school: time on the side, and for the first time, real intent. between research tasks and after hours, i started studying.

the next fifteen months were quiet and hard. self-learning is its own kind of work — you bump into the same wall a thousand times without anyone telling you which way the door is. i picked up Python, then Go because the internet said it was good for systems work. i poked at AWS, Docker, Linux. i built things i didn’t finish. i finished things that didn’t matter. but i kept going.

around mid-2023 something clicked. i’d been trying to build apps — frontends and backends — but the part i kept enjoying was the wiring underneath. how does the app get to the server? how do you know it’s healthy? what happens when it falls over at 3am? that felt like my question.

DevOps and infrastructure work — CI/CD, observability, the boring important layers — was where i wanted to be.

in February 2024 i landed a DevOps engineering internship at Adaptive Computer Solutions in Accra. six months later i was full-time. i’ve been there since, building pipelines, standing up observability, and answering “what changed?” at varying levels of panic.

the non-CS background still shows up in my work, and almost always for the better. metallurgy taught me to think about messy real-world systems — fatigue, stress, slow degradation — and that mindset is exactly right for production infrastructure. patient debugging is the same skill no matter what’s breaking.

i’m content with where i am, and hungrier than ever for what’s next. the rise of AI and autonomous systems is the most interesting thing i’ve watched the industry do in years, and i want to be in the rooms where it gets built right — reliably, observably, and with a little bit of taste.

and i’m grateful for that afternoon next to Ephraim.