It Took Me 20 Years to Come Back to Tech
Dev Journey | CoderLegion
What happens when someone who discovered programming as a child spends nearly two decades working in a completely different industry—and then finds their way back into technology?
For Jan Duris (@JankoD84), the answer is a journey through programming, Linux, mechanical engineering, CNC, QA, test automation, DevOps, release engineering, and eventually building his own SaaS product.
Jan's relationship with technology began when he was a child experimenting with computers and programming. He later moved into mechanical engineering, where programming continued to appear in a very different form through CNC machines.
Almost twenty years passed before he returned to IT professionally.
His first IT role was in QA, where he had to learn an entirely new world of software development, environments, testing, and processes. From there, he gradually moved into automation, Python, Playwright, CI/CD, DevOps, and release engineering.
Today, Jan works as a QA Automation Engineer and builder, focusing on software quality, release reliability, developer tooling, and AI-assisted delivery. He is also building Dulvarn, a release intelligence platform designed to help teams make better release decisions using evidence, automation, and AI.
This is his story.
It Took Me 20 Years to Come Back to Tech
My career in technology didn't begin when I got my first QA job.
In a strange way, it began when I was about four years old.
Every year during the summer holidays, I used to spend two or three months at my great-grandmother's house in the Czech Republic.
There was a small storage room upstairs.
I spent entire days there with my mother's cousin.
For most people, a storage room probably doesn't sound like the beginning of a journey into technology.
For me, somehow, it was.
That was where computers first became something more than machines.
They became something I wanted to understand.
I had no idea what software engineering was.
I didn't know what QA meant.
There was no DevOps, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, AI coding assistant, or SaaS product in my world.
There was just curiosity.
And a question that has stayed with me for most of my life:
How does this actually work?
My First Programming Experience Came Before I Really Knew What a Career Was
While I was still in elementary school, I started attending a programming course.
We worked on PMD 85 computers.
For anyone who grew up with modern laptops, cloud IDEs, GitHub, and AI assistants, those machines probably look almost prehistoric now.
But for me, they were fascinating.
I learned things like:
- BASIC
- Pascal
- Turbo Pascal
There was something magical about writing instructions and seeing a machine respond to them.
Later I got my first computer of my own: a Didaktik Compact.
That gave me the freedom to experiment by myself.
There was no carefully structured learning roadmap.
No "become a developer in 12 weeks" course.
I learned because I wanted to make the machine do things.
I broke things.
I tried again.
I read whatever I could find.
And slowly, programming became something familiar.
Then I Discovered Linux
Linux became another important part of that journey.
I started experimenting with some of the distributions that were available at the time.
Again, I wasn't thinking about a career.
I wasn't building a portfolio.
I wasn't trying to optimize my LinkedIn profile.
I was simply interested in what was happening underneath the graphical interface.
Filesystems.
Processes.
Commands.
Configuration.
Bash.
That relationship with Linux never really disappeared.
Even today, Linux and Bash still feel like home to me.
They have followed me through different parts of my career, even during the years when programming itself moved into the background.
Then Life Took Me Somewhere Completely Different
Teenage years arrived.
Programming became less important.
Games became more important.
Technology was still around me, and Linux never completely disappeared, but I stopped imagining programming as the obvious direction of my life.
Then came secondary school.
I ended up studying mechanical engineering.
It wasn't exactly the future I had dreamed about when I was younger.
But sometimes a decision you make early in life defines much more of your future than you expect.
Mechanical engineering became my professional world for roughly the next twenty years.
I worked as a mechanical designer and technologist.
I worked with manufacturing processes.
I worked with technical drawings and 3D components.
And I programmed CNC machines.
So programming never really disappeared.
It just changed form.
Instead of telling a computer how to process data, I was telling machines how to manufacture physical components.
And in hindsight, the two worlds taught me many of the same things.
Precision matters.
Processes matter.
Small assumptions matter.
You need to understand what happens before and after your own part of the work.
And when something goes wrong, the cause is not always where the failure becomes visible.
I didn't know it at the time, but those lessons would later become very useful in QA.
The Dream of Working in IT Never Completely Disappeared
Even after years in mechanical engineering, IT was still somewhere in the back of my mind.
It was one of those things you tell yourself you might return to someday.
The problem with "someday" is that it can easily turn into twenty years.
Then I met the woman who became my wife.
And sometimes another person sees something in you that you have stopped acting on yourself.
She knew that working in IT had been something I had wanted since I was young.
She encouraged me to finally do something about it.
To take an entry-level IT course.
I agreed.
But I had one condition.
She had to do the course with me.
IT wasn't her field at all.
That actually made me respect her even more for agreeing.
We went through it together.
I helped her heavily with the technical parts, and by the end it sometimes felt like I had completed the course for two people.
I didn't mind.
I still don't.
Because what mattered was what happened next.
After about twenty years away from the career I had imagined as a child, I finally had a real path back into technology.
My First IT Job Was in QA
My first job in IT was at SolarWinds in the Czech Republic.
Getting it changed much more than my job title.
We moved to Brno for the opportunity.
I had finally made the transition.
And then I discovered something uncomfortable.
Getting into IT and understanding IT are two very different things.
I was entering an industry with years of technical experience behind me, but software development had its own language.
Its own processes.
Its own mental models.
Things that seem completely normal to me today were confusing at the beginning.
Even environments.
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