Thanks to Ninad for being so supportive, I met Ninad on twitter, and he has been a constant support with the tools I have built over the years, providing feedback and also has been a help whenever I had a requirement. He is someone who can share some good pointers to starters and learners out there. Do check this short QnA

Who are you? what do you do? What is your profession?

I'm Ninad Pundalik. I work as a Site Reliability Engineer at Slack. I work with various engineers in my team to operate services that make Slack work better with productivity tools.

How did you stumble on your profession? Is there a path which you followed to pursue your profession?

During college, I used to provide hosting on the LAN for some of our student activity groups. A few years later, my first team after internships was involved in testing installations and upgrades of enterprise software across multiple OS/DB combinations. This made me realise that I enjoyed working on systems, and I started exploring more modern methods of what I was doing then (traditional operations roles). I switched to a DevOps team, and since then, I've been continuing this journey.

Is there a curriculum you have, which can be of help to early starters, if yes please share Any blogs / professionals we could follow, please list / share?

I usually recommend following the map charted out on https://roadmap.sh/devops. Another option I have recommended previously is to go through the various questions /exercises on https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer and gain a deeper understanding of software architecture and understanding infrastructure's implications on it.

How do you balance work and other interests?

I haven't done a very good job of this in the recent past. I used to be better at keeping time aside for my hobbies till a few years ago, when I would read, attend music concerts and participate in tech events. That worked well because I had limited demands on my time in the day and had a lot more flexibility with scheduling :).

If you have to share anything interesting, can be on any topic please share.

Picking up The Phoenix Project and reading it would be a nice idea! Along with the obvious allegory/analogy for development and operations work, there's also a good primer for thinking about interpersonal issues, prioritising and scheduling work, and a bunch of other things relevant to working in a team. If that book interests a person, they can find more dedicated, valuable books about each of those topics.

Refer one person whom I should talk to next?

Have you already reached out to @_swanand or @SathyaBhat or @mehulved?