Devops

Sometimes I will describe to others the things which I do between nine and five on weekdays as "system administration". Other times, particularly close to tech seminars on new technologies with free beer and food I'll refer to myself as DevOps.

What is DevOps? To me, it's the difference between fixing or deploying something (operations) manually, versus coding a script or application (developing) that does the operation (operations) for you, usually automatically.

Tech seminars usually make me feel ignorant because the bleeding edge technologies which are presented always seems so far from what I can actually work with in whichever current enterprise client I'm working for. In Adelaide, however, they do reunite me with clients that I worked with many years ago. It does make me feel accomplished when they say, "Hey, it's Brad. We're still using his scripts from eight years ago to deploy our apps."

Being able to leave a legacy of automation as I move from job to job helps me to validate myself as DevOps. I always think, if I'm using the same journal code a decade later I must be doing something right.