About Half Fast DevOps: The Long Haul#

Welcome, weary traveler, to the digital crossroads that is Half Fast DevOps. Behind this somewhat-functional website (built with the inherent irony of free-tier services, naturally) lies a mind steeped in the peculiar absurdities of the IT industry.

I’ve been elbow-deep in the digital trenches since the mid-90s. What started as a promising career in a burgeoning new field has, over the decades, evolved into a testament to liver damage and a caffeine addiction that could power a small data center. I’ve seen the dawn of the internet, the rise of the dot-com bubble (and its spectacular burst), the early whispers of “agile,” and the full-throated roar of “DevOps.”

Having witnessed trends come and go with the predictable regularity of a broken clock, my most frequent utterance in meetings has become, “Oh no! Not again!” Whether it’s microservices that re-invent SOAP, or containers that are just VMs with less overhead, the echoes of past fads often resonate just beneath the shiny new buzzwords.

My 401k has made more ups and downs than a rollercoaster designed by a particularly sadistic engineer. Each market fluctuation, each tech bubble inflate-and-pop, feels less like a calculated risk and more like a cosmic joke being played at the expense of my retirement plans. Perhaps the true answer to life, the universe, and CI/CD lies not in technology, but in diversified low-cost index funds… or a very long vacation.

For decades, I’ve watched the industry work very hard to change. We iterate, we innovate, we disrupt, we transform. Yet, with a philosopher’s detached amusement, I’ve often concluded that it often stays the same, just with different buzzwords and a different order of the same objectives. We call it “synergy” then, “holistic integration” now. “Waterfall” became “Agile,” then “Scrum,” then “Kanban,” then “SAFe,” and now… well, probably something new by the time you read this. The core desire to ship software faster and with fewer bugs remains, but the dance steps keep changing, often to the same old tune.

So, here at Half Fast DevOps, we don’t promise revolution. We promise observation, a knowing chuckle, and perhaps a shared sense of the absurd. We’ll explore the tools, the processes, and the people of DevOps, Agile, and the broader IT field, not with naive optimism, but with the weathered wisdom of someone who’s seen too many “game-changing” paradigms that ultimately just changed the names on the whiteboard.

Don’t panic. We’ll all half-fast.