Hey {{first name | there}}. I started my tech career at 16 in a small town in southern Nigeria. It was lonely. Learning to code without a tech community
Today, I am a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Ambassador, Founder & CEO of EverythingDevOps.
And I have worked with AWS, Atlassian, Ansible, and other Big Tech orgs.
How did that happen?
I went places. ELOPMENT
🧠PRESENTED BY EVERYTHINGDEVOPS
Kubernetes can be a lot to take in when you're just starting. The best way to understand it is to get a cluster running and start working with it.
In this hands-on crash course, you'll build a local cluster, deploy your first application, scale it, expose it in a browser, and deliberately break things to see how Kubernetes responds. You'll also learn the core concepts behind pods, deployments, services, and YAML configurations.
By the end, you'll have deployed an application yourself and a foundation to build on.
Subscribe: @EverythingDevOpsHQ for deeper dives on agents, Kubernetes, MLOps, and AI infrastructure.
🧗THE EDGE: What remote work can’t do for your career
Engineers built the tooling that made remote work possible, so it makes sense that most of us assume everything else can run the same way.
With careers handled over Zoom, networking done in DMs, and opportunities arriving through a well-written README.
I believed that for a long time too, and then I attended my first conference in 2019, Lagos, Nigeria, and it showed me how much I’d been missing, because I walked out of that room with a network & a dream that years of being online and responsive had never produced.
These days I’m at 10+ events a year, and the pattern has held every time
The conversations around an event are where people decide who they trust, who they recommend, and who they think of first when something opens up.
The part that doesn’t happen on a Zoom call
A video call has an agenda and a hard stop, while a hallway has neither, which is exactly why I got here, coming from rural Nigeria.
People remember faces in a way they don’t remember usernames, so the engineer who shook someone’s hand at a meetup tends to get the reply, while the one who sent a perfectly reasonable LinkedIn message is still waiting
And if I’m honest, going places is the best investment I ever made. I think you should make that investment too.
Remote is how most of us do the work, and that’s fine, but the relationships that shape a career still mostly get built in person
✅ACTION ITEMS FOR YOU
Pick one event in the next 90 days (a local meetup counts). You can find events here:
GO!!! GO!!! GO!!!
Reply and tell me which one you picked; I read every response
Your move.
P.S. Know an engineer who’s been “meaning to go to a meetup” for two years? Forward this to them
🧠TOGETHER WITH ATLASSIAN
Join Andrew Boyagi, Customer Chief Technology Officer, Atlassian, and key industry thinkers Kelsey Hightower, Jennifer Riggins, and Nathen Harvey on November 9th for the 2026 State of Dev Ex webinar. It’s based on real research from over 1,500 people in the industry. And the webinar’s focused on developing a clear AI strategy that fixes friction and builds workflows that actually work for devs.
🔭VISIBILITY STACK
The Only DevOps Skills That Actually Matter in 2027 – Other engineers seem to love this video. I think you will too.
I am currently in Miami, and I will be at KubeCon in Salt Lake City next week. Let's meet. Reply to this email if you will be there.
Stay sharp. Stay visible.
Divine Odazie
CEO, EverythingDevOps