A lighthearted, comedic lightning talk about the various roles DevOps engineers play.

If an engineering org were a classic paper and pencil RPG party, what would you be? DevOps engineers would be a bard, because we dabble with pretty much everything: software engineering, operations, systems design, security, reliability, and support!

Being a bard means being vocal, opinionated even, about all of these things, because we’re interested and invested in all of the above. It means having the agility to slot into any of the roles as secondary (even primary sometimes) and pivot on the fly if necessary. It means knowing a lot, of a little of everything, and being clever with how to put the flexibility to great use. It means buffing Ops teammates with increased defense and power to take on business challenges, it means helping triage systems back to life along with the SRE cleric, and it also means creating your own arcane incantations to help other software engineer wizards further unlock the mysteries of our code.