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Jez Humble
My DevOps “aha” moment was at a start-up in 2000—my first job after graduating. For some time, I was one of two technical staff. I did everything: networking, programming, support, systems administration. We deployed software to production by FTP directly from our workstations.
Then in 2004 I got a job at ThoughtWorks, a consultancy where my first gig was working on a project involving about seventy people. I was on a team of eight engineers whose full-time job was to deploy our software into a production-like environment. In the beginning, it was really stressful. But over a few months we went from manual deployments that took two weeks to an automated deployment that took one hour, where we could roll forward and back in milliseconds using the blue-green deployment pattern during normal business hours.
That project inspired a lot of the ideas in both the Continuous Delivery (Addison-Wesley, 2000) book and this one. A lot of what drives me and others working in this space is the knowledge that, whatever your constraints, we can always do better, and the desire to help people on their journey.
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