This is the DevOps Days Austin version of my 13-year retrospective, covering how my mental model evolved from a simple operations-meets-development bridge into something much broader. The video starts partway through – the hippie days preamble was not recorded.
My 2012 model had four areas: pushing to production (area one), operational feedback to the project (area two), project knowledge about how things work (area three), and operational knowledge flowing back into development (area four). This later got simplified by Gene Kim into the Three Ways. The tool explosion of that era – Puppet, Chef, Vagrant – taught me that tools and culture go hand in hand, despite the “DevOps is not about tools” refrain.
The startup years shattered mantras. Apple’s App Store kills “deploy faster.” Prime-time TV with a one-hour window kills “run all tests.” Cost constraints kill “automate everything.” These edge cases forced more nuanced thinking. The serverless shift expanded my worldview to include supplier relationships – Amazon once told us we were not a good serverless use case because of concurrent user economics. SaaS vendors communicate through retrospectives, documentation, and conferences, not just APIs.
The DevOps Handbook gave enterprises permission to adopt what the community had been practicing for years. But my startup’s failure taught the hardest lesson: if the bottleneck is HR, sales, or marketing rather than engineering, no amount of DevOps excellence saves you. We are one piece of a bigger system, not the saviors.
DevSecOps expanded the map. The thin book on trust introduced four facets: competence (can you do it), sincerity (do you mean it), reliability (will you show up), and care (do you give a damn). We over-index on competence. My eventual definition became: DevOps is everything you do to overcome friction created by silos – any silos, anywhere in the organization.
The “reinventing organizations” framework revealed that every company mixes command-and-control, measurement-driven, empowerment-based, and autonomous cultures simultaneously. Each comes with a paradox: the more you automate, the less you understand what the automation does; the more you measure, the more you measure the wrong things; the more autonomous the teams, the more shared platforms they build. Platform teams risk re-creating the old ops silo. New complexity keeps arriving. LinkedIn titles keep multiplying. And that is okay. DevOps as the friction-reducing meme will persist through whatever comes next.
Watch on YouTube — available on the jedi4ever channel
This summary was generated using AI based on the auto-generated transcript.