Hi All, I’m new to this community and wanted to share an experience I had on Friday. I’ve been working in a DevOps role for the past few years, but it hasn’t been true DevOps—mostly busy work and writing Python scripts here and there. Recently, I checked my company’s job board and noticed an opening for a DevOps II position. I decided to apply. I informed my supervisor, and she reached out to the hiring manager to put in a good word for me. The first step was a meeting with the team to determine if we would be a good fit for each other. That went well, so we moved on to the next step: the interview. During the interview, they sent me a link to a codeshare website. The first question was: “Use Terraform to create an admin username.” They wanted me to define a variable and create a resource. I’ve done this many times, but usually, I have old code to reference or use the internet to look things up. I explained this to them, and they were understanding. So, I pulled up Google, visited Terraform’s documentation, and completed the task. Next, they asked me to write a bash script for a simple task: combining two variables, "hello" and "world," and printing the result. I’ve never done this from memory before and couldn’t complete it. While this is an extremely basic task, I’ve always relied on guides or AI tools to assist me. The final question was more conceptual. They asked me to describe how to move an application from on-premises to the cloud and scale it from 1,000 to 10,000 users. I handled this question confidently and provided a solid answer. Afterward, we discussed how reliance on AI (like ChatGPT) and frequent Googling can lead us to forget the fundamentals. The conversation became awkward, and I realized something important: I need to relearn the basics. That’s why I’m here. I want to collaborate with peers, learn from them, and improve my skills so I can rely less on the internet and more on my own expertise.

Hello! My name is Ben. I am from the United States and have interest in getting better at DevOps. I want to learn this because my current job is DevOps and I have realized I depend too much on AI / googling things. My goals are to commit to memory many of the day to day tasks without needing to look things up and will commit to that through learning from the community.