Removing What You Hate from Software Development

You likely know you are in a great place if you are a software developer these days. The explosion of opportunities is largely based on the premise that practically any competitive organization today, regardless of what it does, is a software company that relies on the DevOps team to create and deploy the underlying platform on which the business model is based. But part of this API-centric revolution has emerged thanks to new programming tools, technologies and practices. These include, of course, Kubernetes,  microservices and cloud-native deployments, “fail fast, fail often” philosophies and other practices brought to the open source forefront by the likes of Netflix and Google. But as a developer today who loves to program and code, some, if not much, of the work can be unrelated to applying your skills and creativity to solving problems with code. You might instead find yourself struggling with more mundane tools and practices that might necessitate deployments to, for example, cloud-native platforms. Unfortunately, much of the job has to do with working with YAML and shell scripts, creating spaces and file names, etc. and devoting time and energy to “ all of those things that has to do with getting your code running that actually has nothing to do with code,” Gene Kim, co-author of the seminal and still very timely books “The Phoenix Project” and “The DevOps Handbook” and advisor to Atomist, which offers a software-delivery platform for cloud-native platforms.