Here's a thing about legacy (that is, successful) software systems. With every one of them, we hit a point where we can either make them sustainable with a lower level of expertise, or make the lives of everyone around them miserable. I've been fortunate over the years. I've gotten to deal with that turning point at least 5 times, maybe more depending on how you count.

The first two times, nobody on the team even knew we were making a choice, and we chose "misery".

I've been thinking a lot lately about sustainability for the systems we build and operate. Early in a system's life, there's a lot of activity - building things, learning about the problem space, adapting code to changes in the perceived needs. There's also multiple people working on it, focused on it, for weeks on end, maybe years. That experience gives them an in-depth knowledge of the system, kept active through their daily encounters with it.

Next up: @jessitron on Principles of Collaborative Automation. #devopsdaysnyc DevOps isn't automation (although automation contributes to it). It is a situation involving people. The principles in this talk come out of the resilience community, who have done a lot of study of collaboration. #devopsdaysnyc