From devops to CTO: 5 things to start doing now [Video]

You can’t control when opportunity comes knocking, but you can prepare. Here are five ways tech leaders in devops roles can level up for an invitation to the C-suite.

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I was promoted to CTO in my late twenties, and while it is common to see young CTOs leading startups these days, it was unusual in the ’90s. I was far less experienced back then, and still developing my business acumen. While I was a strong software developer, it wasn’t my architecture and coding skills that helped me transition to a C-level role.

Of all the technical skills I had back then, my devops skills were the most critical. Of course, we didn’t call it devops, as the term hadn’t been invented yet. We didn’t yet have CI/CD pipelines or infrastructure-as-code capabilities. Nonetheless, I automated our builds, scripted the deployments, standardized infrastructure configurations, and monitored systems performance.

Developing all that scaffolding enabled …