Man, it's been a long career, and it's just getting started. I'll never beat these kids at their own game, but it'll take them a long time to learn mine. Reliability is a headspace, not a skill, and my head's as clear as it's ever been.
Within the clarity is a truth, "I just enjoy the work."
I'm not going to give you the "I'm so SRE, I bleed golden signals" pitch. Can we admit it's not a technical challenge? It's barely an organizational challenge. Everybody's already on board. It's a support role. It's teaching. It's "you sure about that, kid?" No -- it's not even that. It's keeping your lips zipped so the kid can make mistakes, because your job was never to interrupt the mistakes, it was to interrupt the impact to the business, and you did your job well.
Am I a tech whisperer? No, I have good instincts, know what to prioritize, and I don't cut corners. If that's not enough, too bad. I'm plum out of empty promises. All I can do is start where you're at and get you where you want to be at a clip that might have been called 10x back when progress was incremental.
But man, it's been a long career. Why bother?
A long time ago, this industry wasn't my problem. I could walk away -- I had other interests -- and I did walk away, in the middle of my Computer Science degree.
I didn't stay gone for very long -- I just found the door that demanded new thoughts instead of learned algorithms, and I've been dancing between the frontier and the legacy ever since.
But I can't walk away from the industry now. It's in the roughest shape I've ever seen it in. LLMs represent a tower of bad decisions that, against all odds, are the best damn thing we've ever made. There are not gonna be a lot of folks who can find their way through this maze. I'll help however I can, and then I'll retire.
Just not yet. Not until I leave the youngins with the same thing the graybeards left me.
Our job is just getting started
Throughout my career, I had every tool I needed to build anything I could dream of.
The youngins deserve the tools to build what I couldn't.
So we're gonna help lasso this tornado before we go.
But it'll require a legendary team.
I can build them a sandbox. What can you build?