From Resetting Passwords to Containerizing Java: My Pivot to DevOps

For 4 years, I lived in the world of IT Operations. My days were spent handling incident response, managing data lifecycles, and making sure systems stayed online. I learned how to troubleshoot under pressure, talk to frustrated users, and keep the business running. But I had a lingering frustration: I was always fixing other people's code. I never got to build it. And more importantly, I was fixing problems manually that I knew could be automated. So, I decided to make a massive pivot. I went back to university (VILNIUS TECH) and recently started a Java Engineering internship at Coherent Solutions. My goal isn't just to become a Java developer. My goal is to bridge the gap between Development and Operations- DevOps . In my first few weeks at Coherent, we started learning about enterprise architecture. But the moment that truly clicked for me was when I built my first Docker image for our project. In my past IT life, deploying an app was a nightmare. "It works on my machine!" was a constant joke (and a constant headache for the Ops team). Setting up environments, installing the right Java version, configuring databases—it was manual, error-prone, and boring. Then I wrote a Dockerfile . I packaged our Java application and its dependencies into a single, isolated container. Suddenly, I realized: This is how you solve the "works on my machine" problem forever. As someone who used to be the guy manually fixing those environment issues, writing a few lines of code to completely automate that process felt like a superpower. I'm starting this blog to document my journey in real-time. I'm currently diving deep into: 🔹 Java 21 (the newest LTS—highly recommend checking out Virtual Threads!) 🔹 Spring Boot & enterprise backend architecture 🔹 Docker & containerization 🔹 Next up: CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) If you are currently stuck in IT Support or SysAdmin roles and dreaming of becoming a DevOps or Software Engineer—you aren't alone. Let's learn toge