**Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and start living with Pipelines
**
2007.
I was there, typing away in a dimly lit office, surrounded by the gentle hum of servers that were actually in the same building (kids, ask your parents about "server rooms").
My tools of the trade? CruiseControl (bless its XML-filled heart). Ant scripts that looked like ancient scrolls. ClearCase—the version control system that required a PhD in theoretical physics and the patience of a saint. And good old SVC, because Git was still just a twinkle in Linus Torvalds' eye.
Back then, we called it "Build Release and Management." BRM. It sounded like a mild skin condition or perhaps a small-town accounting firm. Nobody outside our immediate team knew what we did. When people asked my job title, I'd say "I handle builds" and watch their eyes glaze over faster than a Windows 98 boot screen.
I had absolutely zero idea that I was standing at the foot of a mountain that would consume the next two decades of my professional life—and fundamentally reshape how the entire world builds software.
The Accidental Pioneer:
Here's the thing about being "early" to something: you don't know it's early. You just know you're tired of manually deploying code at 2 AM while the developer who broke the build sleeps peacefully, dreaming of clean compilations.
We weren't trying to start a revolution. We were just trying to get CruiseControl to send emails that weren't caught by the corporate spam filter.
But somewhere between wrestling with ClearCase branching strategies and writing Ant targets that would make a masochist wince, something was happening. The seeds were being planted. The industry was slowly realizing: "Wait, maybe the people who write code and the people who run it should probably... talk to each other?"
Revolutionary stuff, I know.
The Unstoppable Tidal Wave
Then DevOps happened. Or rather, DevOps happened to us.
Suddenly, everyone cared about what we did. Developers wanted to know about deployment pipelines. Ops wanted to understand the build process. Managers started using words like "synergy" and "continuous delivery" in meetings, usually incorrectly, but the intent was there!
The tools exploded:
• Jenkins rose from the ashes of Hudson
• Git arrived like a glorious messiah of branching
• Puppet, Chef, Ansible—we could finally script servers like code
• Docker containers (containers! that weren't Solaris Zones!)
• Kubernetes—because one container is lonely, but thousands need a therapist
• Terraform—infrastructure as code, because why should apps have all the fun?
Every few years, just when I thought, "Okay, surely we've automated everything now," the universe would respond: "Hold my beer."
From BRM Newbie to DevSecOps Eng. Lead
Fast forward to 2026. Two decades later:
I'm now DevSecOps strategist, FinOps Focal, ML Ops Starter, AI OPS enthusiast, Forced Innovationist across multiple Platforms.
The naive BRM learner who once celebrated getting CruiseControl to trigger a build without crashing now spends days thinking about:
• Shifting security left—so far left that security is practically in the parking lot before development even starts
• Platform engineering—building internal developer platforms that feel like magic, but with better documentation
• Compliance as code—because auditors shouldn't need spreadsheets in 2026
• MLOps—applying DevOps principles to models that have opinions about cats vs. dogs
• FinOps—because the cloud isn't actually "infinite," it's just "very large and surprisingly expensive"
• Cognitive load reduction—fancy term for "making sure my engineers don't quit to become goat farmers"
The tools have changed. The complexity has multiplied exponentially. But the mission remains surprisingly similar: get good software to users reliably, securely, and without waking anyone up at 2 AM.
Because We're All Still Here…
After twenty years, here's what I've learned:
Lesson 1. Nothing ages faster than "cutting edge."
I once gave a talk about why Maven was the future. I stand by what I said, but I also stand by my cargo shorts from 2007. Some things should stay in the past.
Lesson 2. The more things change, the more they break.
We have GitOps, policy-as-code, canary deployments, and chaos engineering. And yet, somewhere today, a developer is pushing directly to main and wondering why prod is on fire. That developer was me in 2008. It might still be me occasionally in 2026.
Lesson 3. DevOps is still growing because software is still eating the world.
Every industry, every company, every idea eventually becomes software-driven. And software needs to be built, deployed, and run. We're not running out of work anytime soon.
Lesson 4. The best tool is still the one your team will actually use.
Kubernetes is amazing. So is Bash. So is that weird shell script Frank wrote in 2019 that everyone pretends to understand. The technology matters less than the culture.
Lesson 5. We're all still learning.
I've been doing this for twenty years. I still Google basic YAML syntax. I still panic when a pipeline fails. I still celebrate small victories like a deployment that works on the first try.
I have had infinite lessons with finite scars in my DevOps journey.
To start with my 'epiphany' during my DevOps dark days, I would refer below books for 'Serious only' DevOps enthusiasts.
Patrick Debois - The DevOps Handbook
Gene Kim - The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook
Jez Humble - Continuous Delivery, The DevOps Handbook
John Willis - The DevOps Handbook, Docker tutorial series
James Turnbull- The Docker Book, The Art Of Monitoring
Nicole Forsgren- State of DevOps Report, The Data on DevOps
Alan Shimel- Founder DevOps.com & DevOpsInstitute.com
Mike Orzen - Lean IT: Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation, Field Guide
Chris Riley - DevOps.com, The Journey to DevOps – A Testing Perspective
Sean Hull - Authors AWS, databases, scalability, and the cloud
What's Next?
If someone told me in 2007 that I'd still be doing this in 2026, writing blogs about DevSecOps and platform engineering, I'd have laughed. Then asked if ClearCase finally added Git integration. (It didn't. It really didn't.)
But here we are. DevOps isn't a job title anymore—it's how software gets made. It's not a team—it's a culture. It's not a trend—it's the baseline.
And the best part? It's still growing. Still evolving. Still full of problems to solve and puzzles to untangle.
To the BRM newbies, the DevOps engineers, the platform builders, the SREs, the release managers, and everyone who's ever spent four hours debugging a YAML indentation issue:
Welcome. The journey is weird, wonderful, and absolutely nowhere near finished.
Come for the automation. Stay for the people. And never, ever trust a deployment on a Friday afternoon.
A Former BRM Enthusiast, Current YAML Survivor
P.S. - If anyone needs me, I'll be writing Ant scripts for old times' sake. Just kidding. I'm not a masochist.
Top comments (1)
This is such an incredible journey to read through.