The Double Life: Balancing DevOps and Dough
I’ve just started my full time role as a Senior DevOps Automation Engineer at IntraFi. How will I balance delivering amazing production code alongside decadent desserts? It'll exhausting and exhilarating, but somehow it’ll work.
The Reality
Monday through Friday, I'm deep in cloud infrastructure, automation scripts, and CI/CD pipelines. Saturday evening? I switch gears entirely—prepping cookie dough and calculating ingredient ratios for the weekend farmer's market.
Sunday morning, I'm up before dawn, loading baked goods into my car, and spending hours at the Olney market talking to customers about Megabytes of all kinds.
What Makes It Work
Batch Everything: I prep multiple recipes at once and use every minute of oven time efficiently. Just like in DevOps, batching operations is key.
Automate Relentlessly: Stand mixers, digital timers, standardized shopping lists—I've optimized my workflow to minimize manual steps.
Schedule Protection: Saturday evenings are baking time. Sunday mornings are market time. Everyone knows I'm off-grid during these windows.
Data-Driven Decisions: I track which products sell best, which recipes are most time-efficient, and adjust accordingly.
The Unexpected Benefits
DevOps has made me a systematic, methodical baker. I troubleshoot failed recipes like I debug production issues—analyzing variables and testing hypotheses.
Baking has made me a more patient engineer. Not everything can be automated or rushed. Sometimes you need to trust your intuition alongside the data.
Most importantly, each provides what the other doesn't. DevOps offers intellectual challenge and problem-solving. Baking offers creative expression and immediate, tangible results I can share with my community.
Is It Sustainable?
Can I maintain this pace forever? Probably not. But for now, it's working. I'm learning constantly, building two skill sets, and creating something meaningful in both domains.
The exhaustion is real. So is the satisfaction.
If you see me at the Olney farmer's market on a Sunday morning, slightly bleary-eyed but enthusiastic about my cookies, know that I was probably debugging infrastructure on Friday and baking until midnight on Saturday.
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Do you balance multiple passions? How do you make it work? Share your experience in the comments!
