December 31, 2019

twenty years on

On December 31, 1999, I was on call for production at U S WEST (Solaris and FreeBSD servers running email, USENET, authentication, and the like). We worked hard to ensure that the worst thing that happened was my pager broke the strap on my party dress. When the Y2K truthers start up with their nonsense these days, I’m the grizzled old-timer muttering, “Hush, kid. You weren’t there. You didn’t carry a pager. If you were one of us, you’d know the truth.”

On December 31, 1999, I was on call for production at U S WEST (Solaris and FreeBSD servers running email, USENET, authentication, and the like). We worked hard to ensure that the worst thing that happened was my pager broke the strap on my party dress. When the Y2K truthers start up with their nonsense these days, I’m the grizzled old-timer muttering, “Hush, kid. You weren’t there. You didn’t carry a pager. If you were one of us, you’d know the truth.”

Twenty years later, another decade’s end is upon us, and as is our custom of recent years, today features food and friends at a cabin in the woods, plenty of snow, and birds outside.

As for the whole odometer-rollover thing, my main reaction is “Oh. Huh. Guess that’s happening again?” But sure, let’s look back at some moments from this decade!

In 2010-2011, I worked in infra/ops management at a university supercomputing institute. The best part was working with @zruty, @gabehpc, and other such wonderful folks.

In 2012, @thingles got me to jump to a startup; 8thBridge is where I got into public cloud, and Jamie is also to be credited for getting me into public speaking (eventually so very many talks!) and onto Twitter and into HBase-shaped adventures.

In 2014, @ry4an convinced me to join the fun at DramaFever where I got to work with @0x74696d, @peterjshan, @paddycarver, and more. We were dockering all the dockers, which made for some good learning and some fun conference speaking. I started co-hosting Arrested DevOps at @mattstratton’s invitation. And @mfdii convinced me to run devopsdays in Minneapolis, which led to @patrickdebois asking me to run the global org.

In 2015, @littleidea recruited me into his party of adventurers at Pivotal, where I was no longer on call for the first time in my career. Different but interesting moving from “I have root where you live” to “I’m going to tell you a story about software” for a couple years.

2017-2019 brought more devrel fun on @ashleymcnamara’s team at Microsoft.

In mid-2019, I changed roles inside Microsoft to @LachlanEvenson’s team where I’m learning a ton in product management (for wonderful open source like Helm!).

Of course, since devrel event commitments stretch months into the future, I wasn’t through with the previous gig’s commitments until year’s end. This year brought some fun travel with @joelaha including the 10-year anniversary of devopsdays in Ghent.

Our extended family’s go-to question of “where are you traveling next” finally has a new answer of “I have literally zero flights booked”, which is an amazing feeling. Also, I’ve noticed they’ve started asking “so do you still work at the same place?” without specifying the place because they have no idea what I do for a job, let alone where I do it. This may be a familiar feeling to some of you.

So yes, some of us switch gigs a lot more than others - but it’s because there’s a ton of great stuff to learn, and it’s useful to know when you don’t want to repeat yourself and it’s time for something new!

(If you’re looking for adventure and excitement without changing jobs, I’ve done 39 escape rooms since 2015, escaping from 32 of them. Escape rooms are like a LARP of being on call, without the misery!)

I’ve named a lot of folks, but there are so very many more who are incredible, so just take a look at the speakers I’ve been fortunate enough to feature at devopsdays Minneapolis in 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. And our local organizer team is amazing!

Okay, what’s next (other than submitting to the devopsdays Minneapolis 2020 CFP)? For the next decade, go forth and adventure. Maybe you’ll be saving the world with @shinynew_oz & Camus Energy. Maybe you’ll run for office. Maybe you’ll come build carbon-neutral k8s infra at a cloud provider. What matters most is that you learn, and grow, and leave the world better than you found it.

Given that I lived through being on call for Y2K, I used to worry about 2038. These days I sometimes wonder if modern civilization is going to make it that far without devolving into a Mad Max scenario of canned goods and shotgun shells, but I like to think that we can fix this flawed world of ours together.💖