Writing a book is the hardest achievement I’ve set out to accomplish. I finished it like a marathoner at the end of a long race, crawling toward the finish line. I was empty. But finishing the book isn’t the interesting story. The journey is where I learned the valuable lessons. Only in the tears and the toil, in the mud of my own emotions and self-doubt, did I learn the truths of struggle, resiliency and creative work. Engineering software is creative work. Yes, we talk about algorithms and lambdas. But our work transcends science and technology. I believe we need to rethink the definition of success, learn to write the first draft and work as a community to better technology. It’s the lessons I learned in the trenches of my own creative work that I think we can apply to our DevOps organizations.