Meet Team Kinsta: DevOps Engineer Jenna

Happy International Women's Day! This month, we'll be chatting with some of the talented women who make up Team Kinsta, and today we're kicking things off with DevOps Engineer Jenna. Keep reading to see the advice Jenna would give to her younger self, learn how Neopets (yes, Neopets!) led her into the tech world, and how she handled our major Cloudflare integration.

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Tell us about your Kinsta journey: how did you get started in your field, and what brought you here??

I had a very winding road to my current position and Kinsta. When people ask me how I got into tech, I like to first tell them a story from my childhood.

There was a digital pet website called Neopets, and they had the ability to put your own HTML and CSS in certain pages to personalize them. I was immediately interested. I searched for tutorials and tested changes for hours! I remember seeing JavaScript in some guides too. I must have been 10 years old or so; I didn't know what JavaScript was, but you bet I started trying to copy and paste that in too. After some frustrating attempts, I realized the site actually blocked JavaScript code from being used in the custom HTML blocks ??. That just made me more curious though. I moved to GeoCities or whatever free website builders they had back in the day that let me actually try JavaScript.

As a young adult, I moved to freelance web development. I found the magic of open source applications like WordPress and built sites for small business clients.

Freelancing could have a lot of unpredictable hours, so eventually, I started looking for set-hour jobs in the website industry. I got on at a hosting company for the first time in 2015 as a Customer Support Specialist. I had a wide variety of hats from that point including helping with Billing, Abuse, and Migrations, but the technical or Engineering department tasks always had my heart.

I followed that passion (with a lot more learning from amazingly smart and kind colleagues across each company) to Kinsta eventually. It was actually a prior colleague that moved on to work at Kinsta that got me reading the Kinsta job openings. I loved what I heard about Kinsta's culture, benefits, and happy employees, so I applied!

What are the main responsibilities of your role??

Sometimes I find it hard to describe my day-to-day work as a DevOps Engineer. Every day greatly varies. I'd say my main responsibilities are leading the projects I'm assigned, communicating between teams, and a lot of learning new technologies, system architect planning, and coding.

What was the transition from SysOps to DevOps like??

The transition between roles wasn't much of a change, but I think that's because I kept volunteering or asking for more and more tasks that fell under the DevOps umbrella to begin with (I couldn’t help it! I loved them!).?

When the official role change was offered, the only difference was I no longer monitored our server health stats or did daily SysOps tasks of server maintenance.

What’s been the best part about working at Kinsta??

There are a lot of things that make Kinsta a great place to work, but the one that stands out for me personally is the trust they show to their employees. I didn't always find that at other companies. At Kinsta, whenever I was confident I could handle a task, I was pleasantly surprised my lead trusted my confidence and let me take it on. There's a healthy amount of work review by peers or leads of course, but never once did I feel like they didn't trust me to handle my job well. It's an empowering feeling, one that makes me happy in my work.

You’ve been instrumental in our Cloudflare integration over the past year- how did you approach this process and what were some of the highlights and challenges along the road to implementation??

Handling our Cloudflare project wasn't much different from any other task in terms of approach. I always start with research, figure out what's possible and what's not, determine scope at each step of the task, and finally break it into small pieces and get hyped up to tackle each part!

One thing different was I had help from many more amazing team members on the Cloudflare project. Working with them and seeing key steps of the project completed were definitely the highlights.

There were a lot of challenges along the way too. Most arose from small, unnoticed deviations in an otherwise homogeneous system. It's extremely hard to keep a balance of wide customizations to suit any client and maintain system consistency. But eventually, we found a great path that kept both in working harmony. I couldn't have done it without our Engineers and Developers' constant help, ideas, tests, and encouraging each other.

What advice would you give to your younger self??

My younger self was never easily discouraged. I found a path I loved and ran on it till today, so I feel like I wouldn't give some cheery advice like "never give up!" Instead, I'd be a bit serious with myself: You love your work, you don't complain, you work hard, you respect your colleagues and bosses, but among all that please realize that you deserve some respect as well. Not just in a traditional aspect, but respect for your work, time, and skills you use.

In my very early working days, I didn't register that. There were periods of unpaid overtime and aggressive management communication I didn't seek to resolve. I want to clarify this wasn't at any company you'll see on my LinkedIn! I've been very fortunate to work for better and better companies as my career started in the hosting industry.

What’s something you accomplished recently that you’re proud of?

This might be a somewhat silly one, but I love my hobbies when I make time for them. My latest hobby project was a handmade gothic lace dress I sewed for Halloween. It was much more intricate than any dress I designed prior (it actually had a zipper sewn in it, ha!), and it came out exactly as I dreamed. It was a hit at our Halloween events!