Title: Reflections on a Remote DevOps Journey Amidst Platform Engineering and SRE Evolution

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October 7, 2019. The date seems quaint now, but it was the day when my work world began to shift in ways I couldn’t have predicted. Back then, platform engineering was gaining steam as a concept, internal developer portals like Backstage were just starting their journey, and SRE roles were becoming more ubiquitous. COVID-19 was still months away from upending everything, but the signs of remote-first infra scaling were there.

I remember those days vividly. I was in the thick of Kubernetes complexity fatigue, wrestling with how to streamline our platform while ensuring reliability and scalability. The conversation around eBPF was buzzing with potential, yet it seemed like a distant dream compared to what we needed right now. ArgoCD and Flux GitOps were just emerging as the saviors from the chaos that could ensue when you had multiple clusters and environments.

One day, I found myself debugging an issue with our cluster’s network policies. It was one of those “why didn’t anyone catch this earlier?” moments, but we were there, trying to make sense of a tangled mess of networking configurations. As the team worked through it, I couldn’t help but think about how much simpler things could be if Kubernetes had some better out-of-the-box features.

But that’s not all I was thinking about. The tech world around us was in flux too. Hacker News was full of stories that seemed to encapsulate both the broader industry landscape and our own struggles. For instance, the Blizzard Hearthstone player suspension for Hong Kong comments brought up a whole other set of ethical and moral dilemmas we often overlooked in our day-to-day work. Meanwhile, debates around political advertising on Twitter highlighted the complexity of navigating free speech and corporate responsibility.

In our own sphere, the fight over uBlock Origin’s status with Chrome was an interesting case study in open-source friction. It brought to mind the challenges of managing dependencies and third-party integrations—something I had to deal with constantly as we tried to keep up with ever-evolving tech stacks.

Arguably, one of the most impactful stories for me that month came from TurboTax’s 20-year fight against free tax filing. It made me think about how much our tools and services can impact people’s lives, and how important it is to build systems that are accessible and fair. This resonated deeply with my sense of responsibility in building reliable infrastructure.

Reflecting on these events now, I realize how they shaped not just the tech industry but also my personal journey as a platform engineer and manager. The push for better developer portals like Backstage wasn’t just about streamlining our own processes; it was part of an effort to democratize access to tools and empower developers across the organization.

As SRE roles continued to proliferate, I found myself constantly arguing against the notion that “Ops is dead.” In many ways, it’s not that ops is gone—it’s evolved into something more complex and interconnected with development. The goal isn’t just to keep things running; it’s to build systems that are resilient, scalable, and maintainable.

In my day-to-day, I wrestled with the reality of remote-first infrastructure scaling. We needed tools and processes that could handle distributed teams without breaking down. Tools like Flux GitOps seemed promising, but implementing them required a lot of upfront effort—and sometimes, those efforts felt like fighting an uphill battle against our own complexity.

Looking back, October 2019 was a time of transition and introspection for me as an engineer. It was about recognizing the challenges we face in building modern infrastructure while acknowledging the ethical and societal implications of the work we do. It’s a reminder that being a good platform engineer isn’t just about technology—it’s also about responsibility, collaboration, and empathy.

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That’s my reflection on that day, now a year (and more) behind us. The journey continues, but for now, I’m content to learn from the past as we move forward into whatever comes next.