bootcamps are pretty light on backend/devops type knowledge which turns out pretty critical for "real" jobs. Do you think this can generally be picked up later or should people in bootcamps do something like an AWS certification (just to pick an arbitrary skill proof point) to be sufficiently well-rounded?
You pick that up at work or on your free time. I'm less than a year out of a bootcamp. Just this month I made a small webapp for a project that my team's working on. I wanted to learn how to deploy something from scratch (using Docker -> AWS), so I read about that for a bit, peppered our DevOps people with a few questions, and then went and did it. I learned a ton! Just seek out opportunities at work to learn new skills.
I've never done an AWS class or have any certs, so I can't say for sure if its worth doing. In my case, I've mainly learned on the job and have had some really fantastic mentors to work with who have trusted me to make decisions and let me run with them.
I also read a ton of books on design patterns, architecture, deployment, ops, etc.
Deployment / DevOps changes so fast though - Docker and AWS didn't even exist a few years ago!
If you're totally new to deployment, I'd do something like this:
* Get comfortable with the basic Unix/Linux commands (basically, to the point where you can navigate the file system and mv/cp/rm files with ease, change chmod permissions, etc.)
* Create a simple webapp in the stack of your choice. Literally a webserver for a site that says 'hello world'.
* Deploy it on Heroku. With their CLI it's like a single command.
* Congrats! You deployed a site! Go on Heroku's management dashboard and take a look at the logs. They won't make much sense, but get a feel for what's going on.
* Go on digitalocean and make a droplet, which is a VM that's running on their servers. Pick the Ubuntu 16.04 droplet. (Note, you can pick 'One Click Apps' which are VMs that come preloaded with the stack of your choice, but don't do that now). Read about how SSH works. Now SSH into your droplet. Cool, now you're connected to your server!
* Learn how to install the dependencies for your webapp. I don't think the droplets even come with git, so you gotta install everything from scratch. Then get your app running!
* From here, keep playing with your webapp. Figure out how to make your server run your updated code. How to add a database. Do it until you're really comfortable with running your site.
* By now you've run into a ton of issues with the site breaking. It's hard to keep your dev env and the live server synced! Start learning about Docker. Dockerize your app and deploy your app to Digital Ocean as a Docker image.
* When you're comfortable with THAT, start learning AWS. Learn what a EC2 instance is, what RDS is, what you can do with S3, etc.
* Finally, deploy to AWS!
You can use the free account tier at Digital Ocean / AWS to accomplish all these tasks.
Bootcamps don't teach you AWS because that would cost them money and eat into their profits if they showed anything useful. Plus they probably don't want to be on the hook for some student goofing up and running up a huge AWS bill.
I get alumni surveys all the time asking what things they should teach and the one thing that is consistently never on the list is ops/cloud-related training.
