Half-Fast DevOps Lexicon

A roadside attraction for the spiritually exhausted engineer, curated from the dust storms of CI/CD and the mutterings of frustrated SREs at 3 AM.

Below is the Half Fast DevOps terms batch of terms chronicling the strange creatures, cosmic phenomena, and corporate hallucinations one encounters while practicing DevOps in the modern enterprise.

DevOops

noun — A cosmic inevitability at the intersection of best intentions, bad planning, and a Slack channel left unmuted.

Varieties include:

• Management-Induced DevOops — “Move fast, guardrails are expensive, we believe in you.”
• Practitioner-Induced DevOops — “We automated it so aggressively even we don’t know how it works.”
• Quantum DevOops — Where pipelines behave differently when observed."

The Velocity Mirage

noun — A shimmering dashboard illusion suggesting progress, produced by doubling story points until the numbers look pretty.

The team still crawls through sand. Leadership still sees water.

Cargo Cult CI/CD

noun — The ritualistic copying of ancient YAML scrolls in hopes the pipeline spirits will show mercy. Hell, who cares about mercy, just work!

Identifiable by comments like “DO NOT DELETE OR PROD WILL CRY.”

Sisyphus-Driven Development (SDD)

noun — Pushing the same boulder of tech debt uphill each quarter while smiling like a well-paid existentialist.

Camus approves.
Your manager claims it’s “continuous improvement.” When you ask the manager to define improvement, Zoom crashes.

Blameless-But-We-Know-It-Was-Gary Postmortem

noun — A meeting committed to psychological safety, punctuated by everyone glancing at Gary’s misconfigured laptop.

No blame assigned.
But oh, it lingers like last week’s deploy.

The Dashboard of Dorian Gray

noun — A perfectly green dashboard hiding infrastructure that’s held together by hope, duct tape, spit, an old towel, and tribal memory.

Beautiful on the surface.
Deeply haunted underneath.

Schrödinger’s Pipeline

noun — A build that is both passing and failing until someone reruns it, observes it, or curses it by name.

Science regrets getting involved. Ironically, often caused by a sneezing cat.

Agile-ish

adjective — Scrum-flavored workflow where ceremonies are rigid, sprints are eternal, and nobody remembers what “incremental delivery” meant.

Great for culture.
Terrible for sanity.

YAML Fatigue

noun — The creeping suspicion that indentation is a psychological stress test devised by ancient aliens.

Occurs sometime between the 4th and 9th deployment file. Bourbon doesn’t cure it, but enough bourbon will make sure you continue not to care about it.

The Ritual Sacrifice of the Junior Engineer

noun — Having the newest team member “click the deploy button” to absorb latent cosmic guilt from the release gods.

Ethical? No.
Effective? Absolutely.
Team Building Event? Not a good one, but helps hit that quarterly quota.

Microservices Purgatory

noun — The state of maintaining 170+ microservices with 4 engineers and documentation written entirely in rumor.

You can leave anytime.
But you never will. Over-Engineered? Of course, that is the point.

Kafka-esque Help Desk Ticket

noun — A ticket that becomes more abstract with each update until no one remembers what system it was for.

“Please open a new ticket.”
For what?
“No one knows anymore.”

DevSecOops Exception

noun — When security issues are acknowledged, deprioritized, scheduled for Q3, and quietly forgiven by all involved.

A tragicomedy in three acts. Typically reschedules for Q4, but nobody actually gives a YEAR!

More terms will be added as the universe continues to invent new forms of technical absurdity.
You have entered the Lexicon.
There is no map.
Only release notes written by indifferent gods.