Invitation and write-up from Alex Yates.

Bringing people together

I’m excited about DevOps. I first heard the term as a sales person at an IT company. I recognised the gulf between the sales and tech silos at my company and I could observe conflicts with many of my customers between developers and DBAs. I had a lightbulb moment when I realised the potential – if you could just get all these different people and teams to work together effectively with a shared vision.

I’m also increasingly aware that we aren’t just conflicted in our work lives. I live in the UK and my society is increasingly polarised. I know the same is true in lots of other places. Our community tends to communicate through social media, most commonly on Twitter, where we create echo chambres for ourselves as we follow people who share our views and we consciously or unconsciously unfollow or block anyone who disagrees with us. Even if we try to avoid it, the algorithms tend to show us the content we like to read anyway.

It seems to me that at work, online, and in society at large we are becoming more stubborn and less open to exploring ideas that challenge us. It’s my belief that if we were all (myself included) more open, not just to talking, but to genuinely challenging our existing ideas, we would all benefit. I believe that’s true both in our professional and our personal lives.

The challenge

I would like you to write about something in your IT career that you have changed your mind about. What was your original opinion? Why did you believe that? What do you believe now? Why did you change your mind?

You are welcome to discuss technical or non-technical topics. Feel free to go as deeply technical or as personal and human as you like. Brain-melting technical posts about the inner workings of the SQL engine or effective machine learning architectures in Azure are great. SQL 101 posts or perspectives on age old debates such as tabs and spaces or where to put your commas are great too. Human posts about effective teamwork or diversity or wellbeing in tech are also great.

I hope that if we think hard about the ways we have changed our minds in the past, and if we read about how and why other people have changed their mands, it will help us to have better conversations in the future. I hope this will help us to work together more effectively at work – and maybe in other parts of our lives as well.