By Kahiro Muturi

The Safaricom PLC engineering team was on campus on Friday, June 9 for the second technical immersion session. Their goal is to unlock the secrets of DevSecOps and to revolutionize the world of software development for our students. In an age where many people, businesses and customers spend more and more time online, Development Operations has never been more important. Creating a seamless relationship between program development and operation is the difference between the success and failure of businesses.

The Accelerated by Safaricom program aims to train the next generation of DevSecOps engineers. “This program works to empower students to have the capability of being DevOps engineers at an organizational level” said Peter Kiptanui, a DevOps engineer at Safaricom. In his remarks, Mr. Kiptanui also noted that DevOps required collaborative efforts among different people to pool their strengths together and build something great.

Other speakers during the session spoke of the modules that would be covered in the program, including how these modules were also used by Safaricom’s DevOps engineers, as well as their benefits and their drawbacks.

Brian Tarno spoke about Gitlab (a module used to develop, secure, and operate software), Keith Njagi spoke on Jenkins (a module that automates the parts of software development related to building, testing, and deploying, facilitating continuous integration and continuous delivery), Peter Kimeli spoke on Sonarqube (a quality assurance module) and last but not least, Winnie Gakuro spoke on Fluxcd.

The students had an informative session where they got to listen to and learn from people within the industry, they hope to join soon.