Fantastic article. I'll aways have a soft spot in my heart for Digital Ocean because their paid tutorial program was what got me into devops and made me a better more well rounded engineer. Great writing style too!

Hi! I work on the "Write for DOnations" program at DigitalOcean and I want to thank you for your kind words. Your comment put a huge smile on our faces when we saw it. Glad to hear we were able to help you along your journey-that's what we're here to do.

The tutorials on Digital Ocean got me started as a system administrator. I started around the same time Digital Ocean started. It was easily one of the most reliable sources around with up to date and easy to follow tutorials!

Big shoutout to Digital Ocean for being a reliable source for tutorials and hosting!

Never thought that could be one of the additional benefits for the get paid to write program. Very happy to hear that it worked out so much for you!

The tutorials were always very pragmatic to what I wanted to do as a web developer, and were written in a thorough but simple style that fit my needs perfectly. For example setting up a basic load balancer with Nginx, setting up and hardening a basic Postgres configuration, multi-master database replication, etc.

It was very clear that the people writing the tutorials actually used what they taught in production environments.

This is a stark contrast to "modern" documentation for Google Cloud or similar services where the people writing the documentation didn't actually have to backup what they were teaching with actual experience (because at their company they used proprietary technologies that involved copying and pasting from other proprietary technologies).

Of course they weren't all perfect but I put it up there as some of the better documentation I've ever worked with (perhaps made possible in the 1-off format where their scope was relatively limited and not trying to upsell an auxiliary service).