Want to see what I’m doing in the field? This page contains everything for all guest blogs, podcasts, videos, public appearances, and video courses that I create or participate in.
The Directed Five
I started The Directed Five because I’ve been in plenty of situations throughout my career as a Systems Administrator, Developer, Senior Cloud Engineer, Lead DevOps Engineer, Consultant, and CTO where I had a lot to learn quickly, study a ton, and take a lot in. I constantly thought to myself“there must be a better way to do this other than burning myself out”
The Directed Five is a passion project that teaches engineers how to get better results from their studies instead of burning themselves out studying all of the latest and greatest tech 80 hours per week. With the power of Cognitive Science, good habits, and positive psychology, any engineer can consume more data and hold onto it instead of losing it.
Home | The Directed Five (michaellevan.net)
We also have a podcast! You can check it out on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and by visiting the podcast home page. The Directed Five Podcast (libsyn.com)
Podcast Appearances
Putting The Dev In DevOps on Day Two Cloud here
Career progression and learning cloud and devops here
The Evolution of IT Careers on RunAsRadio here
Build, manage and CD with containers here
Programming in Go for Cloud Engineers, Cloud Developers, and Infrastructure Pros here.
MS Dev Show about Octopus Deploy here.
Podcast with Don Jones, creator of Learn PowerShell In A Month Of Lunches here.
Dev Rel, Go Programming, and Quality Code on Software Defined Talk
Azure DevOps for Ops on RunAsRadio
Breaking into Cloud and DevOps on CloudSkills.fm
Azure Workflow on AdminDevLabs
DevOps in the Microsoft world on AdminDevLabs
DevOps discussion on SysadminToday
Guest Blog Contributions
Interested in reading blogs that I post for organizations? Check me out on Pluralsight, AdamTheAutomator, IOD Diamond, CBT Nuggets, Cloudskills.io, and Tech Target!
Create A Dev Pipeline in Azure DevOps
Up and Running with Azure Arc and Kubernetes (cloudskills.io)
Building Your First AWS Lambda Python Function (adamtheautomator.com)
Configure Deployment Credentials for Azure App Service
Create an Azure Web App with ARM Templates
How to Not Lose Control Over Costs in Azure
Static Go Code Analysis with Go and SonarQube
Cloud Certifications: Azure Developer Associate
Infrastructure as Code: What It Is and Why You Should Automate It
How to Move from Azure DevOps to GitHub Actions
5 Best Tools to Learn to Become a DevOps Engineer
Research
In what I like to call “Phase 3” of my career, I’ve started to dive into research from a DevOps and Computer Science perspective. I love the ability to go deep on a topic, and research allows me to do that. You can see my research contributions below.
Guided Course Training
Some learners wish to learn visually instead of auditory, but still want the feel of a course with interactive in-browser environments. I’ve teamed up with Educative.io to bring students a course on practicing DevOps in Azure.
The Complete Guide to DevOps in Azure – Learn Interactively (educative.io)
Course Training
I’ve worked with several video training vendors to bring you the best possible courses available.
CBT Nuggets: http://learn.gg/michael-levan
Skylines Academy:
- https://courses.skylinesacademy.com/p/kubernetes-on-azure
- https://courses.skylinesacademy.com/p/dp-900-microsoft-azure-data-fundamentals-certification-course
DevOps The Hard Way (AWS Edition)
I get asked a lot of questions daily that typically sound something like this:
- How do I get into DevOps?
- What type of projects can I do to get into DevOps?
- How can I get hands-on?
DevOps The Hard Way, an open-source project I created is meant to help anyone answer these questions. The project has gained a ton of traction on GitHub and people are really finding it game-changing when they’re trying to break into DevOps.
GitHub Public Repositories
I commit and push code for anything from little scripts in Python, PowerShell, HCL, JS, and C# that I find useful to full-fledged wrappers and applications! All of the code related to my content is also available on GitHub.
AdminTurnedDevOps (Mike Levan) (github.com)
Hashicorp Ambassador
In 2021, I was presented with the Hashicorp Ambassador award for my community work, public code, and several courses created on Terraform.
DevOps Ambassador
As of March 19th, 2020, I am an official ambassador for the DevOps institute! The DevOps institute provides many contributions globally that include DevOps certifications, live training, virtual training, conferences, and many more! DevOps Institute Ambassadors are hand-picked thought leaders and subject matter experts. I’m delighted and humbled to join the effort!
Videos
I love creating written content, but I really love creating videos on YouTube. I feel that it gives me an opportunity to show emotion, smiles, and how excited I am to teach. You can find my YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/clouddevengineering