DevOps is *not* The Hero’s Journey

“Ascribe meaning to random events” ← this pretty much sums up the human condition. We hear ghosts in White Noise, see patterns in random numbers, and a whole bunch more. There’s even a term for it — apophenia — “the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things”

The tricky part here though is that this is part of the human condition. It’s so deeply embedded in our fibre that we don’t even notice it happening, no matter how rational we are. Take The Hero’s Journey — the saga is endemic in popular culture (Bill & Ted, Groundhog’s Day, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Matrix, Star Wars, I could go on forever…) that we tend to find it surprising when the narrative doesn’t fit the mold.

The problem, of course, being that we expect our lives to follow this narrative too, while the universe just doesn’t give a s**t about our expectations. I see this, in particular, all the time in Software Engineering.

Take The Ordeal, for example. Here,

The hero eventually reaches “the innermost cave” or the central crisis of his adventure, where he must undergo “the ordeal” where he overcomes the main obstacle or enemy, undergoing “apotheosis” and gaining his reward (a treasure or “elixir”).

The thing is, our “Ordeals” are not one-and-done! That system outage that we bravely battled together, and emerged from stronger and wiser? Well, there’s going to be another one in the future, as sure as little apples. Oh, this time around it might be an unexpected CPU redline, or a memory leak, or a failing component, or whatever — the point being that there is always another “Ordeal” coming down the road.

Being resilient isn’t about systems not failing. It’s about accepting that systems fail, and being able to deal with that in flight. Once you accept the reality that there is no “Return with the Elixir”, you will start building systems with heightened Observability, that allow you to deal with the next Ordeal. And that’s when you will have grown up.