And I’m not talking about ice cream.
I’m a SRE, a Site Reliability Engineer. It’s almost like a DevOps Engineer, but handsome. My job is to make sure the web services I’m looking after are working. How is that different from a good old sysadmin ? It’s not, a SRE is simply a sysadmin in the Cloud. Same for a DevOps Engineer. And most of the time we share the same Cloud, AWS.
What does any of this has to do with vanilla ? The truth is I don’t like fancy things and I don’t like luxury. I like basic, time-tested, reliable stuff. Hence the vanilla, like in vanilla experience. For example, my favorite pizza is the margarita. Crust, tomato, mozzarella, basil and a touch of olive oil. Another example: I never add milk or sugar to my coffee. I drink it black.
Now, this also goes for the tools I use daily to keep the web running: I run WSL Ubuntu Linux on my Windows 11 corporate laptop and I do almost everything from the terminal, including source code modification using vi. Same with GIT, CLI only. My GitLab pipelines are made of Docker containers running Alpine Linux 3.16 themselves running Bash shell scripts.
Am I a caveman ? Do I hate the modern world ? No and no.
I’m certainly a minimalist at heart, I find simplicity attractive. Simple is beautiful.
What about you ? What are your tools ?
TME520 