Evan Gertis: DevSecOps Engineer

BET ON YOURSELF

Evan Gertis, CBC Spring 2019, shared, “It’s probably the most life changing experience I’ve ever had.”

A couple years ago, Evan Gertis had just finished a job for a defense contractor. He should have felt satisfied, fulfilled even—but instead he felt frustrated.  He was an electrical engineer—the job he’d trained for in college—but like many of us, he wasn’t happy with where his career was going.

“I felt like it was only going to take me so far,” he says, “and that the newest thing, the leading edge in industry, was programming.” Gertis continues,

“I knew I had to retool my skills.”

Gertis already knew about Augusta’s theClubhou.se through his field of work. He joined the spring 2019 cohort of its Code Boot Camp, and, he says, “It’s probably the most life changing experience I’ve ever had.”

The Code Boot Camp was three months of intensive training in practical coding, utilizing the latest cloud-based technologies not found in academic institutions, says Gertis. That assessment is based on his own experiences working on a master’s degree in computer science. 

After his three months in boot camp, Gertis took his career down a new path. Today, from his home office, he works for one of the world’s leading zero trust NAAS providers, NetFoundry. “Were it not for the Code Boot Camp, I wouldn’t have known how to use Google Cloud, work with YAML files, web technologies, Google app engine—all those things that we learned in depth during the Code Boot Camp,” he says.

He’s seen the impact of the boot camp on his fellow graduates too, one of whom went from working as a clerk to a full-stack developer, boosting his salary by $30,000. “I can’t even imagine what that did for their life,” says Gertis, who’s working on giving back by developing his own online class to teach infrastructure as code. 

“I really want my story to help other people,” he adds, “to influence other people to step outside their comfort zone, to risk leaving their comfortable job and enroll in a class, to bet on themselves and see what they can do.”

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“I really want my story to help other people,” he adds, “to influence other people to step outside their comfort zone, to risk leaving their comfortable job & enroll in a class, to bet on themselves & see what they can do.”