The Ops Community ⚙️

Aaron Fowler
Aaron Fowler

Posted on

Let's stop engineering waste

As our team continues to support software and DevOps teams, one word continues to come to mind...waste. I have only been in the IT field for a little over 2 years, but the one thing I noticed right away is that the software development industry is very opinionated. I continue to hear " we have always done it this way", "we operate in a very unique way", " we have very specific requirements and not looking to change". These comments and responses has been the norm for decades and it will continue to be as long as we are focused on our tools and what we have built rather than the true outcomes our organization is seeking.

To use an analogy, let's say I need a car for my job duties. If I need a vehicle to get my job done, should I just go buy one or I should go get all the tools, parts, and material and build my own? If I build my own, I waste time, resources, left with tools I will probably never use again, etc. I believe this is where the developer pride starts to kick in. "This is what I built", "I don't need your solution, I'll just go build my own". This type of mentality leads to... WASTE!

Point being, we have to move towards a consume over create mindset when needing the proper solutions to get our job done. There many tools and emerging platforms that we can adopt rather going and configuring, building, and managing on our own. It's going to take some time, but I believe consume over create will become a big trend within the software development industry over the coming decade. Many new developers and leaders will help navigate and shape how emerging technologies are consumed and the way we start to mitigate technical debt and tool fragmentation.

Top comments (2)

Collapse
 
mataberat profile image
Aris A. Wibono

Just thinking to migrate my Prometheus stack to Datadog after reading this article.

Collapse
 
aaron_fowler_d1d9e565e853 profile image
Aaron Fowler

Datadog is awesome. We are partners with them as well and providing services to clients through Datadog.