What is DevOps? While a general consensus of what DevOps is seems to exist within the community, the precise definition is still the subject of debate. The elusive nature of an authoritative definition brings to mind the Supreme Court of the United States’ definition of obscenity (I know it when I see it). Lacking a firm definition, I’ve found that one of the more effective ways to frame the concepts encompassing DevOps is via an acronym, CALMS. Coined by John Willis, Damon Edwards, and later expanded by Jez Humble, CALMS stands for Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing. In this post, I’m going to focus on sharing.

Traditionally, I understood the sharing aspect of DevOps to mean sharing within your team or business, whether that meant sharing responsibility, information, tools, coffee, donuts, or whatever else. Somewhere along the line (possibly via the Arrested DevOps Podcast), my understanding of sharing was expanded to include contributing to open source, speaking, and even blogging. In other words, giving back to the community. The argument goes that sharing publicly is something that will help not only me, but my organization win, but taking the first step has felt especially challenging.

As an introverted Windows IT pro working in a part of the industry where being tight lipped is encouraged, the idea of sharing with strangers is inimical to my natural tendencies and training. While I feel confident that I’m a high performer at work, what could I possibly share with the community that hasn’t already been said in a better way? Won’t everyone feel that I’m just wasting their time? Why would anyone read my content when they can instead consume content from recognized experts? As it turns out, this sentiment is a common one, and it even has a name: Impostor Syndrome.

In order to help myself “just get over it and share already”, I’m trying to approach this as a personal growth exercise. If I do that, then it doesn’t matter if anyone cares what I think. I hope that blogging will help sharpen my perspectives, sharing my code publicly will improve the quality of what I do by creating feedback loops (The Second Way), and the personal brand that I create will hopefully allude that my team and I are doing cool things. Heck, maybe someday I’ll speak in front of a users group.

This blog in general, and this post specifically, are my way of trying to turn over a new leaf. While I expect most of my posts will be much more technically biased, this seemed an appropriate way to kick things off.

Hopefully you’ll see me around. I’ll try to avoid hiding in the future. How about you?

^{Image Credit: By Ansonlobo (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons}