Not Having Continuous Deployment Makes Me Grumpy

 

And the monkey flips the switch.

I have the DevOps duties at work. I'm good at it.  I've been on a lot of small-ish teams and needed to automate things in my past.  The problem with all that DevOps experience is that I'm spoiled. I think it is beneath me to deploy code all day every day.  I enjoy scripting and automation.  I can see the benefit in it.

Unfortunately, my continuous deployment capability has been removed recently.  The cloud hosting provider was changed and I can't get access to the CI/CD solution for that platform.  If I was given access it would save everyone time and money but it is off limits.

I still have the development integration server fully automated but not much else.  That makes things easy on the other developers but doesn't make things easy for testing, staging and production releases.  Since I'm the only person on the team doing the manual things, I'm not only bored, I'm jealous.

So how do I fix this?

  • Delegate
    I could ask all the other developers to take on some of the release management load but they are freelancers and contractors.  The duties would just come back.  The other developers complain a lot about all sorts of things.  If I gave them more frustrating problems or manual tasks, I don't know if they would stick around.
  • Ask again
    I could ask again for access to CI/CD in the testing, staging and production environments. After months of getting nowhere, I'm tired of scheduling meetings and everyone telling me I have to wait until at least 2021. My requests for access are falling on deaf ears.
  • Ask for staff
    I've been asking for staff or interviewing for new hires for over a year now. With COVID and the economy, I don't think that is going to get better anytime soon.
  • Look for a better place to work
    I'm investigating this. There isn't enough budget to hire help but just enough budget that if I left someone else would be assigned to my spot.  If this blog post is found, I might get fired and the problem will be solved.
So I'm getting more frustrated each time I'm just zipping up builds and pushing files and not doing any actual programming.

I'll update this post with news on how it all works out.  Until then, I'll just flip the switches all day and dream of a time when I'm a web developer again and doing meaningful work.

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