Technology for me is the hobby that became a profession. My dad bought a typing machine, then an electronic one, then a computer for his medical practice. As a kid, watching technology evolve was fascinating. What I learned is that I care about engineering – how pieces fit together – but even more about usefulness. The real reward comes when someone says “this really helped me solve a problem.” I retreat into technology corners to pull things apart, then emerge to apply it to real use cases. That discovery process – finding how pieces fit a customer’s needs – is like watching a movie build to its climax.
The polite answer about the devops aha moment would be experimenting with agile development, Java servlets, containers, and virtualization. But that is not the real aha moment. The real one came a couple of years after DevOpsDays, when people started sending emails saying “you changed my career.” Not because they got better paid from the hype, but because they landed in places where collaboration lifted them as human beings. Someone telling you they have more fun at work, less tedious tasks, harder problems to solve – that is the ultimate reward.
On the future, I refuse to make predictions. I have seen enough trends to know the crystal ball is stupid. But two things excite me: the continuing discovery of how technology and humans work together (not blind faith in AI solving everything, but computers increasingly assisting us while we retain judgment), and the potential of mass remote collaboration at scale. Open source proved it works. Twitter conversations proved it works. What happens when we take it to the next level? Old things never die in IT – we still have mainframes from the 1950s. The cycles of centralized, decentralized, virtual, non-virtual – that is what gray hair teaches you. But finding new places to explore keeps it interesting.
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