Tips for Overwhelmed Devs

[Full disclosure: I'm a DevOps consultant]

DevOps-type tasks tend to be quite different from traditional Feature-oriented tasks:

• feature = "stateless", you are given e.g. a database and other services, and write code to implement a feature
• devops = "stateful": write Terraform or other code to create and manage resources, ex a database. A challenge is that there's hundreds of types of resources, the interaction can be complex, and each one is slow to build. It's really easy to leave old resources around, costing money or creating confusion.

On the other hand, the Business operates at the speed of the deployment pipeline. The speed and quality of the tests (CI) matters to the Feature devs, so they can get their work done. At the end of the day the code needs to land in Production or the Business doesn't get any value. Features don't matter until they're in front of the Users!

Tips

• find other people in the company, to learn from each other as a team, swarm to fix team-level issues
• weekly: write down team-level pain points, communicate to management
• focus on trust over speed -- it doesn't matter if a test ran in one second if the results aren't actionable
• consider using a more Dev-friendly way to manage resources: ex Pulumi let you write in Typescript or Python to build and manage resources (databases, networks, buckets)

Feel free to contact me, there are other ways you and your team can streamline your work and deliver features faster.