From Tree Surgeon to Principal Cloud Engineer

How I entered Tech...

Before I went through the process of changing careers I was a tree surgeon.

I was running a company and was growing at a good pace but having children, and a few close calls 75ft up trees with chainsaws, among other things, started to make me question my choice of career.

I ended up injuring both my shoulders and was forced to reassess my situation, which led me to apply for a full-stack development BootCamp called IO Academy formally known as Mayden Academy.

This was a sixteen-week full-time BootCamp (which I recommend checking out) that covered web development and OOP, after three weeks COVID-19 forced us to all work remotely.

Upon finishing the course, I spent six months looking for a Junior position in a job climate that wasn't equipped to take on Juniors from a remote setting.

Around five hundred job applications later, which resulted in four interviews, I landed a job at the Ministry of Defence under Defence Digital working as a Junior DevOps Engineer.

This wasn't what I thought I wanted but it led me down a path where I found a real love for the job, working in the CLI, building infrastructure as code and working with interesting clients.

Since leaving the Ministry of Defence, I did a stint at Cyber-Duck / CACI as an SRE, where i worked closely with Clients, managed SME to Enterprise infrastructure and performed security audits and pentests across Azure and AWS for clients.

I’m currently working as a Principal Cloud engineer at an E-commerce platform called Shopware AG while also nearing the completion of my Master’s in business administration at Bath University, where im closing the gap between technology and business requirements.

I post semi-regularly on LinkedIn, so please feel free to connect and share your thoughts with me.

In my blog, I plan to discuss cloud engineering and business with a sprinkle of my opinions included.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading

Sam Crudge Hill