Anthony Armijo

I’ve never been much of a blogger; but I am familiar with the notion that one of the best ways to learn something is by teaching it, so here my journey begins…

A Little About Me

I’m 32, and for a long time I thought I’d end up as a pilot or a police officer. Flying lessons were out of reach, and the polygraph wasn’t exactly my friend. Eventually, though, I convinced a federal law enforcement agency to hire me. Before I knew it, I was getting screamed at by men in big hats at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Academy (FLETC) in New Mexico.

It wasn’t my first taste of stress—back in 2015 I completed 14 weeks of Army One Station Unit Training (OSUT) at Ft. Benning, GA after enlisting in the Army National Guard.

By 2018, with a B.S. in Business Administration (MIS) in hand, I decided to finally lean into something that had always come more naturally to me: technology. I’d been the family IT guy and lifelong gamer, so I cracked open a stack of CompTIA study guides and set off on a new path.

Breaking Into IT

I can attribute a few things to landing my first IT role:

  • A solid job market
  • My degree
  • An A+ certification
  • And a manager willing to give me a shot

From there, I grew quickly. I started in IT Helpdesk, then moved into roles across:

  • Application Support
  • Citrix/Xen environments (air-gapped networks)
  • QA support with Jenkins CI/CD for infra deployments
  • Traditional SysAdmin tasks, with a sprinkle of cloud (AWS EC2)

Each step gave me a stronger foundation across networks, virtualization, and infrastructure—learning by firehose and leaning on good mentors.

The DoD Pivot

My biggest shift came when I began working with DoD systems. On one hand, it was eye-opening: mission-critical infrastructure, built to be resilient and secure. But the cracks showed fast—outdated tech stacks, siloed teams, and layers of bureaucracy that made even small changes painful. It was stable, but it wasn’t innovative.

That’s when I realized I wanted something different.

Why DevOps

I’ve felt the limits of traditional sysadmin work—endless RDP sessions, ticket queues, and manual tasks. What excites me now is automation, collaboration, and modern tooling. I enjoy living in the IDE: writing scripts, building pipelines, and treating infrastructure as code.

This blog is my way of capturing the lessons I learn as I pivot into DevOps. There will be mistakes, restarts, and plenty of “aha” moments—but that’s the point.

Ultimately, I want this to be a record of growth: not just technical skills, but mindset. DevOps is about culture as much as tools, and I’m excited to learn both sides of the coin.

If you stumble across these posts, I hope you’ll find them useful—or at least relatable—as I document my journey into a field that never stops evolving. 🚀

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