The day I became a Programmer: tales of a DevOps Engineer with Impostor Syndrome

At some point along the way, without even realizing it, I essentially became a programmer.

Once upon a time...

I was working with servers, installing and reinstalling OSs, dealing with package managers that were always causing issues when having to work with dependencies that were either too old or too new, manually setting up backups at the FS level, fighting with some servers providers because they were too slow to deploy new hardware, and a long etcetera...

I was a Linux sysadmin, then Windows sysadmin as well, and then a Cloud Architect because everyone wanted to migrate to THE CLOUD and have their own EC2 instance because AWS was the current buzzword.

Some time after that, I became a DevOps engineer, started managing infra as code, but it wasn't really programming, it was simply writing HCL and sometimes some bash scripts.

And then, at some point, everything started being either a YAML file for Kubernetes deployments, a JS script for APIs or proxies, or a Lambda function written in Python for some backend stuff.

This proposed a paradigm shift...

Why would you need a server when everything is serverless? Why would you even need a backup when you simply have a file that you host on GitHub and deploy to either a k8s cluster or a platform like Cloudflare Workers?

Has something failed? Has someone manually updated something and broke everything? Just redeploy! Is the platform having issues? Just redeploy somewhere else! You can now move on with your day like nothing happened.

Sometimes I even feel like there's no longer a need for "the infra guy"; there's always a platform to do whatever it is that the dev needs, so what's the point? But then, the issues appear and you need someone who knows DNS, for example, and you're glad you have someone that was were there at the beginning of times (aka "the hosting provider era").

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Back then, we lacked several safety nets that we have today, and had no self-service platforms like Cloudflare to package everything nicely into a single thing. We were essentially full stack devs but for the Internet as a whole: DNS, Email, HTTP, DB, backups, and so forth; we handled it all with nothing but bash scripts and a prayer. The closest thing to Cloudflare I had when I started was a DNS cluster built with cPanel in DNS-only mode, and docker was just a person employed in a port to load and unload ships.

The times, they are a-changing...

I still don't fully feel like a programmer, though...

I usually feel stuck in a limbo of not knowing exactly where I fit in, or what's my place in this "new" Internet.

I'm writing Python when I work on KeeperHub, and Go for my RPC proxy (aetherlay) and some other tools I'm building, but still feels a bit off-brand for me, as if this wasn't where I belong and I'm just posing (which I think would be considered as "Impostor Syndrome").

It seems that everything has turned into code, slowly but surely, and I guess I'm here simply due to the fact that I don't fight the current... If the IT trends go in one direction and that direction makes sense, I flow with it. Be water, my friend, as Bruce Lee used to say.