The daily work of a DevOps can be like a puzzle in the sense that the idea is to assemble several pieces in a logical order to create a structure understood by everyone. The different assembly steps are usually the same for any puzzle and therefore require learning to gain efficiency.
Efficient time management is probably what every DevOps engineer seeks to advance in his career. This is the skill that the top performing engineers have improved over time and iteration. Time is what everyone needs to learn and test something new to become an expert in the area.
In a world where everything is changing rapidly, productivity and speed through efficient time management is probably what every company is looking for today. This article lists the known time losses that every DevOps engineer should avoid in order to free up time and spend it more effectively.
“God was able to create the world in seven days because God didn’t have to worry about legacy” — Enzo Torresi.
Not reducing the technical debt
The main goal of most DevOps engineers is to identify the technical debt and plan the migration to a new version of the architecture with better processes, newer tools, new ways of working to improve the velocity and the quality of each deployment in production.
Achieving this is never easy. It requires a good understanding of the existing architecture and enough knowledge on new trends to properly define the migration plan. Unfortunately, most of the time, this is not completed in the time allotted to the migration project, which will result in the creation of legacy infrastructure that will require, the next time, reverse engineering to modernize the last elements.
Reducing technical debt is important to move quickly in production, retain top engineering talent (nobody likes to work on unmaintained stuff with no documentation/resources) and avoid rewriting an app from scratch.
Reducing technical debt usually means not working on new features but the trend illustrated by Martin Fowler in the next graph shows that reducing technical debt used to improve feature delivery and quality over time.
