Someone recently asked me this question: “What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘DevOps’?”
A loaded question, I agree, and of course I lied, and made up something about the “first way.” I mean really, if you want a possibly embarrassing answer to a loaded question, you really should confront me face-to-face with it in a public place. If the asker of that question had done so, I would have had to answer honestly that the first thing I think about when I hear the word “DevOps” is Brent from The Phoenix Project novel.
If you haven’t read it, let me explain: Brent is probably you. The one person who knows how all the stuff actually works, and who everyone depends on to fix things when they go sideways. Brent is a hero. And because the book is about DevOps, and DevOps abhors constraints and local optimization (in other words, because DevOps hates heroes), Brent is basically a huge organizational problem.
