After five years of DevOps conferences, the talk opened with Andrew Clay Shafer introducing me via video – a genuinely moving moment. But the talk itself went meta. Really meta. I had been reading philosophy of technology, and the patterns I found mapped surprisingly well onto what we had been doing.
Language matters more than we think. How should we spell DevOps? Capital D, capital O, all lowercase? I once tweeted: what if we just renamed DevOps like Hudson was renamed to Jenkins? The investment people have in the word itself is revealing. The search for a universal rule – Docker runs everything, one tool to rule them all – echoes the Greeks trying to find universal truth. But they discovered that universals are kind of utopian. Bad news for anyone trying to extrapolate DevOps to work everywhere.
Interpretation is equally tricky. “A DevOps team is bad” – why? It could be good if it signals change. “DevOps in your job title is bad” – but can you not be proud of being collaborative? The people interpreting the title might be the problem, not the person wearing it. Context and history matter enormously: whatever process worked at Company A has a history that made it work there. The Toyota system is local knowledge. Jean Kim and I argue about whether the DevOps Cookbook should be prescriptive steps – I do not believe in one-two-three-and-we-are-there.
The irony of automation hit me personally. The more you automate, the less you practice the underlying skills. When the automation fails, you are the one who has to take manual control – but you have been out of practice. Game days exist partly for this reason: to keep the muscle memory alive. And here is the question we do not ask enough: what did DevOps undo? We bashed ITIL – but ITIL started as a community sharing valuable knowledge. We should think about the ideas we have dismissed along the way.
Watch on YouTube – available on the jedi4ever channel
This summary was generated using AI based on the auto-generated transcript.