what the fuck is devops anyway and why should i give a shit?







W..T..F.. is this new thing they call devops? 
its even more of this absolute insanity of working endlessly
just to stay in the sam place you were. keeping abreast of 
the endless churn of meaningless 'updates' and replacing
all the components that keep getting deprecated (the easy
alternative to actually fixing bugs) nevermind that theyre
full of bugs while theyre still in use.. all to
accomplish a goal that one already had accomplished 
last month, three months ago, a year ago, over and over,
but also a goal that we had solved decades ago with
simpler tools.
What do you actually want? a more rigorous and robust
way of developing software? 
there is no magical infrastructure which will do this for 
you. The answer there really is in the caterogy of 
best practices and the simple tools we had decades ago were
fine for it - the real meat was always in discipline and
organization of your team. You should have been using
revision control, tests, backups, code reviews before 
committing changes, and some kind of release engineering
already.. if you needed some magical tool calling itself
'technology' to get your act in order then you were
already screwing up. 

There has never been and never will be a substitute for
actually knowing what you're doing and doing it well. No
matter how many software packages and how many management
fads come and go none of them will change this basic reality.
Though, by trying to enable people who don't
know what they're doing, to write some code, or to get
some results they don't understand, these tools might
simply make knowing what youre doing a whole lot more
of a pain in the ass by forcing arbitrary and pointless
complexity on the people who ultimately must make this
heap of junk work. Add to that the consequence of the
rest of the industry following the same fads, and you get
this neverending churn of half-finished software always
in flux, always needing attention, and a handful of smug
and dishnoest 'gurus', actually charlatans, who will sell
you the fantasy of everything ready and running at the
push of a button.

really, get over it. Institute some basic discipline
in your team, get a grip on understanding what the hell
you're doing and why you're doing it, and go back to
writing actual programs, maybe say some makefiles etc, 
producing actual binaries, with minimal dependencies
and minimum sensitivity to other peoples' shit changing 
on you unannounced, and try to regain some stability,
reliability, predictability, and reproducibility in 
your software development.








This file and all other content on the VAXpower.org site copyright 2008 by G. Economou