The Day The Penny Dropped

One of the tasks that got thrown to me in the past few years, by virtue of my not being particularly fussy about what kind of tasks I was assigned, was automated DevOps.

I'm not afraid to say I struggled at the task. Shitty Team Foundation Server (TFS) interface aside, I really wasn't getting the entire build/artifact/configuration/working directory relationship. My Team Lead at the time was dismayed at my apparent inability to understand the process, but since nobody else in my team was willing to shoulder the burden, it fell to me. Note that I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the task. I just wasn't picky.

So I kept at it, trying to commit everything to memory. But the thing about learning something is, often, simply memorizing it isn't the key. The key is understanding, and the pieces just weren't falling into place.

The final piece.

My Team Lead kept yammering on about artifacts and builds, but this wasn't helping much.

Until one day, I was thinking about Gary Mitchell's Ten Principles of Adult Learning. In particular, the fourth one - People learn easiest what is familiar to them.

That was when the lightbulb flickered. I was going about it all wrong.

What I was doing, was approaching automated DevOps like it was a completely new thing. What was the end result of deployment? A working ASP.NET MVC site. Hadn't I dealt with ASP.NET MVC back in 2012? I had deployed back then, as well, except it had been the manual way. Now what I was trying to do was automate this process.

That train of thought led me further along the path. What had I done back then? The views and assets had been copied directly to the server. I'd had to build, and then copied the resultant DLL file. What were the steps of the automated DevOps, but configured instructions in TFS to do pretty much the same thing?

From there, my understanding of the process grew at an astronomical rate, and within a week, the inevitable happened - a successful series of tests.

About my Team Lead

Not saying he couldn't have done better. Obviously, he could have. But while he was a better tech than I am, unlike me, he wasn't trained to transfer knowledge. He didn't have an ACTA.

On my part, when I set out on my quest for that ACTA in 2017, I had envisioned using it to better transfer knowledge. I certainly hadn't anticipated using the principles learned in order to teach myself.

Life throws you surprises every now and then. This was a pleasant one.

Yours (l)earnestly,
T___T