Abstract Did you know there is a feeling that is the opposite of déjà vu called jamais vu? “Jamais vu involves a sense of eeriness and the observer’s impression of seeing the situation for the first time, despite rationally knowing that he or she has been in the situation before.” (Wikipedia).
Our industry is rife with the opportunity for both jamais vu and déjà vu. Cloud, DevOps, SRE, {latest hotness here}, you name it—they all provoke some combination of these feelings, especially if you’ve been in the operations field for a substantial time. The question is: what do we do with these feelings? This leads to further inquiry, like: what’s a productive response to each, how do we express them constructively to others, how do we allow them to push our field forward (in a humane way) rather than hold it back? Oh, and where do all of these curious responses to the major shifts in our field come from, anyway?
Join me for a talk that will be equal parts neuropsychology, group experimentation, and social and technological commentary (not to mention a little help for you when you try to sort things out in the future). Let’s put the pedal to the meta and together change the way we think about the way we think about the most important developments in our field.
Bio David has over thirty years of experience in the SRE/DevOps/sysadmin field in large multiplatform environments and currently works for Microsoft as a Senior Cloud Ops Advocate. He is the author of the O’Reilly Otter book (Automating Systems Administration with Perl) and the editor/curator of “Seeking SRE: Conversations on Running Production Systems at Scale” (published by O’Reilly in August 2018). David is one of the co-founders of the now global set of SREcon conferences.
