The Devops Boulder Meetup took place last night within modern office space in the downtown Boulder area. It was the first official meeting of 2017, and Peter K. did a presentation on an introduction to DevOps.

After covering Amazon re:Invent for the past two years offsite, I found myself becoming more interested in listening to presentations that covered topics on computer science. Meetups are an excellent way to learn and share complex coding ideas in a forum of like-minded individuals.

Peter did an excellent job of educating the group on automation, penetration testing, protecting and managing data on servers, and how important repetition is within any job. Scan over this PDF by Chef for a quick overview of DevOps in regards to automation.

• Automation: Automation gives you immediate access to the same patterns of success that the Web innovators had to develop themselves.

This quick definition by Chef takes a look at one of the most important fundamentals to server side code development.

Peter pointed out last night that developers have to be careful when automating code. He brought up that automation is an excellent tool when you have proper experience. If a coder goes to automate code they are unfamiliar with, it could create issues. The best method is to test small and to test often, as well as develop an understanding of what works and what creates bugs in a system.

As many tech companies expand their programming departments, I find myself acquiring new coding experience to keep up with an industry that seems to always be in a state of influx. Along with Chef, the language known as Puppet, was brought up at the meeting a few times. Find out more on obtaining certification via the Puppet’s main website.

This first meeting of 2017 was an excellent introduction for people like me that have worked with computer coding on the client side, also known as the front-end, but might lack the experience of managing and developing code for the server side, also known as the back-end.

It is my goal with a series of articles to help inform the public of the importance of understanding both sides to computer science. Depending on where you are in code development, it might be best to start with basic code, such as HTML5 and work your way up to programming on the back-end.

After learning how to manipulate code to display certain products with a Web browser, a programmer can move on to learn how to program other applications to reach intended results. Some people may not want to learn front-end code, and jump into the back-end right away. There is no wrong or right method to learning computer code, but it does help when you learn and develop languages that spark your interest.