My enthusiasm for DevOps
It might appear that I am simply latching on to a trendy topic.
But it actually goes a little deeper than that: the previous time I was involved in professional software engineering ended in about 2004. At the time, my friends and I had been pushing ideas like software as infrastructure, why one should prefer open-source software, and the advantages of text-based systems. But we faced a lot of opposition.
Fast-forward a dozen years: I dive back into the professional development world, and discover... we won! And the name of that victory is: DevOps.
Of course, like every other marketing term, "DevOps" will be over-hyped, and claims about its wonderfulness and ability to make babies' poop smell good need to be taken with a grain of salt. And, of course, in 2004 we hadn't yet forseen every aspect of the DevOps revolution: after all, a whole lot of smart people have devoted a whole lot of thought to this topic in the dozen years I was gone. And I am now in the process of enthusiastically absorbing the many great ideas they have added to what we knew in 2004. But these are great ideas built on top of the approach to developing and deploying software that we are ready knew was the best approach out there.
And I am far from alone in having experienced this: I have been listening to the DevOps Cafe podcast, and a number of guests have remarked that when they first encountered "DevOps," their imediate reaction was, "I've been advocating DevOps for years: I just didn't know that's what it was called."
What's more: the DevOps principles don't just apply to software development. You may not have noticed, but I've increasingly been "DevOpsing" my writing projects. For instance, as you know, I have been working on my review of The Invisible Hand? recently. In doing so, I have been creating "continually deployable" parts of my review: the blog posts you have seen here. Furthermore, I have been continually integrating those "gists" into my actual review.
But it actually goes a little deeper than that: the previous time I was involved in professional software engineering ended in about 2004. At the time, my friends and I had been pushing ideas like software as infrastructure, why one should prefer open-source software, and the advantages of text-based systems. But we faced a lot of opposition.
Fast-forward a dozen years: I dive back into the professional development world, and discover... we won! And the name of that victory is: DevOps.
Of course, like every other marketing term, "DevOps" will be over-hyped, and claims about its wonderfulness and ability to make babies' poop smell good need to be taken with a grain of salt. And, of course, in 2004 we hadn't yet forseen every aspect of the DevOps revolution: after all, a whole lot of smart people have devoted a whole lot of thought to this topic in the dozen years I was gone. And I am now in the process of enthusiastically absorbing the many great ideas they have added to what we knew in 2004. But these are great ideas built on top of the approach to developing and deploying software that we are ready knew was the best approach out there.
And I am far from alone in having experienced this: I have been listening to the DevOps Cafe podcast, and a number of guests have remarked that when they first encountered "DevOps," their imediate reaction was, "I've been advocating DevOps for years: I just didn't know that's what it was called."
What's more: the DevOps principles don't just apply to software development. You may not have noticed, but I've increasingly been "DevOpsing" my writing projects. For instance, as you know, I have been working on my review of The Invisible Hand? recently. In doing so, I have been creating "continually deployable" parts of my review: the blog posts you have seen here. Furthermore, I have been continually integrating those "gists" into my actual review.
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