Vol. 32: The paradox of Kaspar

Hey there,

this letter is a little bit like the paradox of Epimenides: “Epimenides the Cretan says all Cretans lie”. Mapped to this mail we would need to rephrase it to “DevOps-Content-Kaspar claims all DevOps content is biased”. It’s 2021, what is truth but an illusion.

Apart from conceptualizing deeply philosophical opening lines, I’m also literally bombarded with content about DevOps. Interestingly enough, comparably few people shape opinions around these topics. Take the example of the global conversation around “Ephemeral Environments” in the last 12 months. In total there were 43 mentions on social media and around 119 pieces of content. Those were written by approximately 25 different people. This was consumed by 3.6 million people.

Opinions are made online. What isn’t on the internet doesn’t exist - almost solipsism to stay in the realm of philosophy. So 25 people shape the discussion everyone else has. But if you’re part of this “content economy” you start to realize who’s shouting the loudest. And you observe that very, very often these creators have an awfully subjective perspective on things.

The employer branding team at Spotify will tell everybody that Squads are the hot new shit (while the concept has already failed in the engineering team). Or the newly acclaimed DevOps consultant who has worked in two start-ups with 20 developers each writes an eloquent article explaining guardrails for developers are evil. Which gets picked up by a 200-year-old sample corp in the US and all hell breaks loose.

It’s a long prologue to conclude with a fairly simple recommendation: before you consume (put that anchoring effect to work) familiarize yourself with the context of the author. Just use Linkedin. Has never coded a line of code? Sure that’s the best person in the world to enlighten you about your engineering workflow?

Just a thought, maybe it helps you go down Squad rabbit holes. By the way, we have a lot of great new content on our blog!

Keep it up,

Kaspar

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