Talking "Meta" of Technology
Hello 👋🏽
Welcome to the 25th edition of DevShorts!
I write about developer stories and open source, partly from my work and experience interacting with people all over the globe.
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Last month, I was at DevOpsDays (DOD) Amsterdam. It is the first in-person conference I’ve been to after the pandemic. I should say I miss attending these events and talking to developers.
Most of the talks at DevOpsDays AMS did not discuss a tech, a specific method or even a technical paper. Instead, it is all about “The Meta” of technology. Immediately you can argue that DODs are always like this due to the nature of DevOps. Well, I would not say no to it, but I think the meta approach lets attendees tied to their seats. Made them listen to the stories/incidents of the respective technologies.
I felt there is a need for this sort of pedagogy for developers.
Talking about “The Meta” of technology is as important as learning a framework or a tool or a library.
Often, I come across people convinced of using a specific technology to solve their problem without really understanding the meta of that technology. (Keeping aside the TCO savings part!)
For example, I know a startup which calls most of their sys admins and support engineers “DevOps”. Likewise, folks confuse observability with monitoring, SecOps with InfoSec. Lastly, some want to scale their workloads by implementing Kubernetes but fall for management troubles of the Kubernetes by deploying it in-house.
For any tech trend, every engineer must introspect the meta-story for that trend and if it is something that they could leverage at least at a specific angle. Regrettably, most of the companies/engineers jump on a technology bandwagon without realising how it replaces/augments their existing solution.
Another example, the uprise of several Android SDKs for the event and crash data collection led developers to send 100s of events on a single action a user performs in an Android app. This led to performance and battery issues. As an effect, many users started to uninstall apps.
Later, Android Developer Ecosystem teams conducted meetups and awareness drives to make them understand their actions. As you can see, sometimes, not understanding the how and why (The Meta) of the tech would impact your business.
Oh, by the way, I enjoyed some talks at DoD AMS.
Interesting blogs I read this week
A lovely blog series on Android - The Missing Pieces, Why Android worked, Team’s take on why Android worked.
Opensource Project
This week, I came across two kubernetes-specific projects that sounded very interesting.
Paralus - All-in-one Kubernetes access manager. I felt the concept integrates well into the zero trust trend.
kube-green - A Kubernetes Operator to reduce CO2 footprint.
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Aravind Putrevu 👋🏽