Ship It Conversations: From Full-Stack to Cloud/DevOps, One Project at a Time (with Eric Paatey)

This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly (separate from the weekly news recaps).

I sat down with Eric Paatey, a Cloud & DevOps Engineer who’s been transitioning from full-stack web development into cloud/devops, and building real skills through hands-on projects instead of just collecting tools and buzzwords.

We talk about what that transition actually feels like, what’s helped most, and why you don’t need a rack of servers to learn DevOps.

What we covered Eric’s path into DevOps How he moved from building web apps to caring about pipelines, infra, scalability, reliability, and automation. The “oh… code is only part of the job” moment that pushes a lot of people toward DevOps.

The WHY behind DevOps Eric’s take: DevOps is mainly about breaking down silos and improving communication between dev, ops, security, and the business. We also hit the idea from The DevOps Handbook: small batches win. The bigger the release, the harder it is to recover when something breaks.

Leveling up without drowning in tools DevOps has an endless tool list, so we talked about how to stay current without burning out. Eric’s recommendation: stay connected to the industry. Meet people, join user groups, go to events, and don’t silo yourself.

The homelab mindset (and why simple is fine) Eric shared his “homelab on the go” setup and why the hardware isn’t the point. It’s about using a safe environment to build habits: automation, debugging, systems thinking, monitoring, breaking things, recovering, and improving the design.

A practical first project for aspiring DevOps engineers We talked through a starter project you can actually show in interviews: Dockerize a simple app, deploy it behind an ALB, and learn basic networking/security along the way. You don’t need to understand everything on day one, but you do need to build things and learn what breaks.

Agentic AI and guardrails We also touched on AI agents and MCPs, what they could mean for ops teams, and why you should not give agents full access to anything. Least privilege and policy guardrails matter, because “non-deterministic” and “prod permissions” is a scary combo.

Links and resources Eric Paatey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-paatey-72a87799/

Eric’s website/portfolio: https://ericpaatey.com/

If you enjoyed this episode Ship It Weekly is still the weekly news recap, and I’m dropping these guest convos in between. Follow/subscribe so you catch both, and if this was useful, share it with a coworker or your on-call buddy and leave a quick rating or review. It helps more than it should.

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