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Being a developer is not necessarily a life-long goal of ops people. I like playing with all the toys in the toybox - sometimes I need to write code to make things play the way I want. I went to school to become a programmer, and discovered that while I enjoyed programming for myself, I hated doing it for others -- otoh, I had been working as an ops guy to pay beer money, and found that it was a lot more aligned with my interests.

Most of these tools though, are written by engineers who don't want to understand the tools they were given, and want to write their own. Even the vaunted pulumi's 'aws-native' package is just built on top of cloud control which is built on top of cloudformation which is often cited as the reason terraform (which pulumi is based on top of) was created: "eww, I don't like that tool".

Which is all to say - people write code because they have a problem - engineering, operational, it doesn't matter. Assuming an ops person wants to become a developer is akin to assuming all developers want to become managers, and that all managers want to become TV stars. The logic presumes a viewpoint that simply isn't true.




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