What do you do when you join a company as a software engineer, and there’s zero DevOps in place—but product delivery can’t wait? In this talk, I’ll share firsthand insights from building core DevOps infrastructure from the ground up, while simultaneously delivering the first software products under tight deadlines. I’ll outline the key priorities and quick wins that enabled rapid, reliable releases—such as setting up basic CI/CD pipelines, introducing automated tests, and using containerization for reproducible deployments. Rather than aiming for “perfect” infrastructure from day one, I’ll show how to build DevOps foundations incrementally and pragmatically, integrating automation step by step as part of everyday development work. Through practical examples, I’ll discuss how to achieve reliability without losing agility, how to avoid common pitfalls in “build as you go” DevOps, and how to balance product delivery with infrastructure improvements. Attendees will leave with actionable tips on how to bootstrap DevOps quickly, so teams can ship software confidently—even when starting from scratch.