Date: January 20, 2026 | Permalink >>

On DevOps: Notes from a Dirty Old Sysadmin

1. Don’t Try. If the pipeline is broken and the error logs are spitting out hex codes that look like a madman’s diary, walk away. Go look at a wall. Drink a coffee. The code smells fear. If you force it, you’ll just break production. The best deployments happen when you stop caring if they succeed.

2. The Pager is the Devil’s Doorbell. It always rings at 3:00 AM. It never rings when you are bored or lonely. It rings when you are finally asleep or making love or trying to forget that you work in a glass cage. Answer it, but don’t respect it. Fix the pod, kill the node, go back to sleep. Don’t be a hero. Heroes die tired.

3. Uptime is a Myth. The managers want 99.999%. They want a god. But machines are like people—they get sick, they slow down, they vomit memory leaks. Acceptance is the only sanity. The server will go down. The only question is whether you have a drink ready when it does.

4. The War Room is a Cage. There is nothing worse than ten people on a Zoom call watching one man type a command. It is the modern coliseum, but boring. If you are the one typing, ignore them. If you are the one watching, leave. Nothing good was ever debugged by a committee.

5. Beware the Enthusiast. Watch out for the kid who loves the new tools. The one who wants to switch the orchestration layer because he read a blog post. He is dangerous. He has energy but no scars. He will build a complexity monster that will eat your weekends long after he has quit to go work for a crypto startup.

6. Code is Trash. Do not fall in love with your scripts. Do not frame your Terraform configs. It is all garbage. It is sand. You build a castle, the tide of the next update comes in, and it is gone. Write it simple, write it fast, and be ready to delete it without a tear.

7. Friday is for Drinking, Not Deploying. Only a madman pushes to prod on a Friday afternoon. You are asking the universe to punch you in the face. If the manager demands it, tell him the build failed. Lie. It is a noble lie. It saves your weekend.

8. Logs Don’t Lie, People Do. The developer says, “I didn’t change anything.” The developer is a liar. The developer is delusional. Check the commit history. The truth is always in the diff. The machine doesn’t have an ego; it just executes the bad logic it was fed.

9. The Cloud is Just Someone Else’s Computer. Do not treat AWS or Azure like a religion. It is just a hard drive in Virginia that you can’t kick when it fails. It is renting a room in a hotel that charges you every time you open the minibar. Keep your bags packed.

10. Complexity is the Enemy. They will try to sell you a mesh. They will try to sell you AI-driven observability. They will try to sell you a dashboard that looks like the cockpit of an alien spaceship. Reject it. grep, awk, and a simple shell script have solved more problems than a million dollars of SaaS subscriptions.

11. Sleep is a Dependency. You cannot debug a race condition on four hours of sleep. You think you are working, but you are just staring at the screen hallucinating variable names. Go to bed. The server will still be broken in the morning, but at least you won’t be.

12. Find the Exit. This is not a life. Staring at glowing text and moving packets of data from one virtual bucket to another is a way to pay the rent. It is not a soul. Write the novel. Paint the bird. Play the horses. Do the job, take the money, and buy your freedom one paycheck at a time.