What's a DevoOs?

Initially, I wanted to name this blog “Uneducated DevOps” in homage to the Uneducated Economist, street level thoughts, opinions, analysis and perspectives from a working-class point of view, but my better half thought I could do better with my choice of adjectives.

Unlike Paul Krugman, the intellectually bankrupt, orthodox Keynesian hiding behind meaningless charts and sophistry to distort simple economic truths, the Uneducated Economists breaks complex topics to a level that everyone could understand them using his experience and observing the ebb and flow of commodities like lumber.

Brake it until you make it

Uneducated in DevOps emphasizes a personal experience above everything else. I know it sounds a bit provocative and giving maybe wrong ideas to impressionable young engineers, but a good education is not a continuous absorption of facts and accumulation of certificates.

In my current role, I’ve met talented engineers who in absence of practical ideas on how to start their DevOps journey, were exchanging lists with must-read books for serious DevOps professionals. I usually help them by first listening to their work, challenges and future plans. Intersections with Infra-as-code automation or Kubernetes are easy to spot.

I help them by asking them to try new ideas on a real project while I watch over their shoulder. It takes a session or two to get them going in the right direction. Before long people start innovating and collaborating. More often than not I learn too something from my disciples. The most important point, that I never get tired of repeating is to embrace failures and learn from them. How could you discriminate among many options unless you are able to apply previous experience to new situations?

Breaking until you make it is especially important to boost confidence in large corporate environments that are rife with restrictions and gatekeepers. A fear of a failure forces people to make wrong decisions – subnets with laughably small CIDR ranges, a VPC with only two subnets, under provisioned capacity for workloads, etc.

Personal experience becomes even more important as systems under management grow in number, size and complexity, which they always do 😊.

Experienced engineers always find the best solution for their end-users. They could always put themselves in the shoes of their clients. Inexperienced ones take the deceptive path of the least resistance and provide sub-optimal solutions. Their insecurities augmented by fear of failure force them to stick to what they know which is to say repeat the same solution as frequent as possible.

Experienced engineers create opportunities and are a driving force behind new projects. Inexperienced just wait to be told.

And when I say experienced, I don’t mean old, but simply having the attitude and patience to try new solutions in a fail-fast fashion until the optimal or good enough solution is found. From experience we learn that the only constant in our work is change. What worked yesterday, might not be applicable today.

Panta Rei, everything flows. You cannot descend twice in the same river. Or, in the words of the famous ferryman from Herman Hesse’s Sidharta book - Much can be learned from a river.

So, what is a DevOps?

Learn you some Git and software engineering, don’t be shy of talking to strangers and afraid of breaking things. Everything else comes with the experience.