From Geek to Star #23 - AI in your tech role: what's your story?

If you missed the previous episodes, you can access them online here.

🗓️ This Week – episode 23: building the story of AI in your job

You have probably been using GenAI assistants for some time in your work. Some in a light usage of meeting / email / document summaries, some in a more advanced way such as code completion, code generation, tests writing, etc… 

Two weeks ago, I discovered a series of short youtube videos (5 min each) by KodeKloud that I found really interesting: showing how AI can be used in the daily life of a DevOps engineer. This newsletter will be short so you can use your time instead to look at one or more of the videos to get an idea of why I find them useful for you. 

Here are the videos, each describing one day of a DevOps engineer:

1. Day 1: starting with the dreaded on-call situation with a major outage in the middle of the night! The story illustrates how an internal GenAI assistant tool could help to analyse a Kubernetes cluster much faster compared to traditional methods of finding a needle in a haystack of logs.

2. Day 2: how compliance audits are usually a pain for tech teams and a nightmare with documentation chaos with multiple versions of documents. And how RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) can speed up significantly this activity

3. Day 3: critical zero-day vulnerability announced! This usually mobilizes all security and devops teams to find out all the places the fix needs to happen. This story illustrates how MCP could allow an internal AI tool to interact with AWS APIs to execute a complex audit.

4. Day 4: in this example, the devops engineer is tasked to do some technical debt and security fix which usually takes manual time. Here, the story shows how sub-agents like a Docker optimizer agent and a Terraform security agent can be invoked to accelerate these tasks

5. Day 5: a P1 critical incident with cascading effect that requires mobilization of many senior experts on call. Managed here by an AI command center invoking different specialized sub-agents through MCP helping to solve the incident much faster. 

Of course the reality is always more complicated. But these 5 short stories illustrate very well how current devops challenges can be deeply addressed with AI. This kind of storytelling is great for devops engineers to project themselves in a desirable future as well as selling this transformation to leadership. And with genAI tools today, any team can generate some videos like those to explain better what they could achieve.  

The same could therefore be done for every Tech function (e.g software development, testing, security…) to build on Hard skills in the SHINE framework through improving the function operations and at the same time bring visibility and understanding about their contribution.

🙏 I’d Love to Hear From You

In your line of work, what is the biggest pain point you have and do you think a genAI / agentic AI approach could help? How?

Reply to this email, I read every note.

You can follow me on LinkedIn for more reflections and “behind-the-scenes” thinking between newsletters. Don't hesitate to engage discussions there in the comments to also start showing and sharing your thoughts publicly - this will help your own SHINE. If you want to know more about how I can support you 1-1 to thrive in your tech career, have a look at my offerings here.  

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✨ May the Shift be with you!

From Geek to Star by Khang | The Way Forward