I’ve been keeping a small, folded piece of an old business card on my desk. It reads:
~ Push to git
It’s a decent reminder. We often forget that our brains are limited: our capacity to store and pull the right information at the right time is downright saddening. Believing that we are capable of building a pyramid or writing Born to Run without pen and paper are unfortunate delusions of grandeur. While your brilliant little monkey mind may have come up with the best code in the universe, it’s always best to commit it to a machine with a better memory.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been building my knowledge of command line up. Found the best way to do this was by showing the cool stuff I had been doing to my friends. Some other older pals came out of the woodwork and showed me not one, but a couple of awesome GitHub links that are always worth a gander. Take this one for example.
As the title implies, it’s awesome. You could probably spend a decade poring over the various internal links and either learning machine code from the bottom up or just losing yourself in something you really like. But what I love the most about it is that it’s a labor of love that large numbers of people have put significant chunks of time into building.
Like wikipedia, nobody got paid to put that together. Some collegiate professor probably could have made tenure assembling a wiki of that magnitude, but it was instead broken down and handed out as chunks to hundreds (maybe thousands) of independent minds who had a simple, shared goal and a direction to push in. And that is, if you will pardon my language, fuckin magic.
The devOps field tends to be one where ‘a’ band-aid of ‘a’ size is placed over a gaping wound in an attempt to stymie the bleeding. The universe of technology grows in sophistication every decade, and if we could measure it as a sigma function, I’m sure we could track its exponential growth from the Bronze Age up until now. I don’t need to tell any of my readers that the vast majority of their great-grandparents grew up doing what our ancestors had been doing for centuries or more. Now, we can’t even be sure that our children will have jobs that look anything like ours.
This explosion of new and different technologies comes in many forms. Some are techniques: stuff like bronze working, glass smelting, language, categorical analysis, literature, or organized farming. Sometime it comes as a thing: an adze, a plow, a raspberry pi or a pair of earPods. We never know what’s going to change everything next.
A fun joke my family carries about my grandfather is that he came home from the Pacific Theater in 1945 and got a job offer from a company he had no idea existed. It was called IBM, and, having been one of the major profiteers of the previous war, it wanted to fix its image, clean house, and hire him into the C-level suite. Grandpa Bob said no. He thought computers were a ridiculous concept and that US Steel was the place to set his heels in and raise a family. And while I know he was a master of playing the stock market, it must have absolutely steamed him to see the rising profitability of computers. Unexplained, and perhaps unrelated, Silicon Valley grew in size and prominence as Pittsburgh shrank. Between the years 1980 and 1984, nearly 45,000 people lost their jobs. Movies like Flashdance paint a sexy picture but my aunts and uncles tell me that the reality was far more terrifying.
What my grandfather, god rest his soul, failed to catch was that the US was shifting into a new form of parity politics. We already had undisputed dominance of the globe’s oceans, practical nuclear supremacy, and an open economy linked with West Germany and Japan. In 1990, this amounted to 2/3rds the world’s GDP. We could buy steel from everybody. The important thing that would have to happen next was developing the ideas that would lead the future.
The explosion of hegemony has continued until this day. Technology spurred onwards by the US, along with a massive dose of political pressure, broke the backs of the old-world empires and flattened out great power dynamics. A country like China, which has been more or less mismanaged by the British between the end of the Opium Wars and the Japanese Invasion, could now obtain nuclear weapons, global clout, and even swing hard enough to force Hollywood to edit ghosts out of its movies before clearing them for domestic release. Now that’s a bop on the nose.
It’s impossible to track the trajectory of history. Consider this virus: its output relies on mass perception, the behavior of millions of individuals, and supply chain economics that boggle the brain. It’s just as hard to predict the trajectory of new economic ideas. My own grandfather failed at this task, but that’s not to say he failed at everything. He helped put me through college, which probably helped get me to where I am today. And while it’s hardly as plush as being the heir to a Cold War computer fortune, it’s plenty to keep reminding myself that the work is valuable.
And that we should always, always push it to git. 😉