Automation transformed my life. I grew up in the DevOps movement and now I'm on a quest to see if generative AI can turn me into a DevOps unicorn while my new baby naps.
In 2008, I was aimlessly working on a bachelors degree at Penn State and needed to pay for it. To do this, I leveraged my IT job at the graduate school admissions office into a proper linux systems administrator role in the central operations group responsible for the university's identity, email, storage, web... basically every core IT service facing faculty, students, and staff. These people ran a lot of systems, and it was all manual.
This meant a firehose of learning and effort from me in the short-term, but I quickly realized that because everyone was kept busy firefighting misconfigured systems or scaling up with student growth, the organization shipped very few new services for its customers. These were really smart, super capable people, held back by IBM blade chassis failures, copy/paste configuration errors, and the trap of treating your systems like pets.
For my own sanity, I found Puppet- a relative newcomer in the configuration management scene -soon to be [mis]known as DevOps- that let you declare the desired state of your systems in a format abstracted from differences in operating system with modular components you could reuse for various purposes. I quickly fell in love with it and realized I could exploit it to keep pace with my colleagues while working 1/5th as many hours, reinvesting my time in banking college credits. This was almost meaningless because a few years later I dropped out of college and moved to Portland, Oregon to work for Reductive Labs, the people behind Puppet.
Long story short, simple automation software made by an eccentric chemist who founded a company of lovable nerds in a town synonymous with weird created my career, taught me everything about enterprise software delivery, and eventually led me to meet my wife and child. Best decision(s) I ever made.
Generative AI-hear me out!- makes me feel like 2011 did. Like with configuration management software, its potential to transform my personal productivity is serious and some of the tools in this space are delightful to use. Obviously, the target audience is much broader than Puppet's but the hype is bigger too.
Time was not kind to Puppet and we'll see how generative AI fares, but I'm excited for the ride. This blog is a personal mechanism to regularly document my experience building things with AI, giving me the opportunity to reflect on how the space evolves and share interesting discoveries with the people around me. Maybe you'll find something useful here too.
My intention is to just build things, leveraging automation (including generative AI) for literally as much of the effort as I can get away with. I'll usually build on AWS (disclaimer! I work at AWS in the AI space after successfully exiting Stackery, a startup I joined after Puppet) but I'm not a cloud expert. I'm capable enough with software and IT operations to be useful but lazy enough to be dangerous. If I teach you something, that's a happy accident.