Technology

I’ve been watching a pattern repeat itself for years, and it’s starting to grate. Someone at a conference hears about a new tool — some Kubernetes operator, or service mesh, or GitOps platform that’s supposedly going to fix everything — and they come back convinced their team needs it yesterday. Not because there’s a problem that needs solving. Because the tool exists. This isn’t about being anti-technology. I love good tools. But somewhere along the line, DevOps culture got it backwards. We’re picking solutions first and frantically searching for problems they might address, instead of looking at what’s actually broken and finding the simplest thing that fixes it. ...

There was a period, roughly 2004 to 2008, when phone manufacturers decided that phones could be fashion accessories. Not phones that looked like fashion accessories. Actual fashion accessories that happened to make phone calls. I collected a few of them, or at least got close enough to handle them, and I still think some of the best phones I’ve ever held had nothing to do with specs or benchmarks. Nokia 8800 Sirocco This was the one that started it for me. Stainless steel body, a sliding mechanism that felt like opening a luxury watch case, and a weight to it that told you it was built from something real. The Nokia 8800 Sirocco wasn’t trying to be a smartphone. It was trying to be a thing you pulled out of your pocket and knew, immediately, was expensive. It worked. ...