Chocolatey Solutions Engineer Stephen Valdinger said, "DevOps isn’t something you do, but rather, it’s a way of doing things. What works for us here, may not work for you there, so you adjust." He then went on to say that DevOps is a way of working that reduces time to introduce changes, while at the same time making changes traceable, accountable, and revertable.

I've seen many companies try to copy what another company has done, especially with regards to DevOps and software development. I see companies copy the organization of teams from Amazon, Spotify, or others. Often quite a bit of time and effort is spent changing the way your development team works, and often without a lot of success.

DevOps is a lot like my studies of martial arts, where you learn some techniques, but it is up to you to implement and use those techniques in your own way. While we may practice in patterns, the actual use of the skill is up to the user. That's what DevOps really is, a goal and set of ideals you aim for, but the actual implementation varies from company to company.

Most of us want to build better software, and most managers want better quality applications, but often we can't get out of our own way because either too many people are resistant to change, or there isn't any incentive to work in a better way. This might be from individual contributors or from management, but without both groups making an effort to improve the software development process and quality of code, we won't achieve much.

To get better at software development, whether C# or SQL, you need to read and learn about how to write better code. You need to learn how to automate the testing, compilation, and deployment of your code to downstream systems. And then you need to discuss and debate what works well, what doesn't, and adjust how the team writes code. Not just you, but the team. We might also need to adjust how we store, package, test, and run code on other systems. We have to experiment in small ways, testing out new ideas, algorithms, designs, and more.

In short, we need to be a team. I like the quote above, but I also hope most of you realize the "you" in that quote is not singular, but plural.