I got pretty deep into ops—technical operations—at Crittercism. Ops people are the harried individuals with their hands on the metaphorical dials, ensuring large technology systems are property scaled, provisioned, and otherwise behaving.

I don't work in ops anymore, but I watched a lot of Star Trek over the past few years, and my go-to metaphor for ops was helm control on the Enterprise. Both involve a lot of button-pressing, mere mortals commanding huge, powerful, incomprehensibly complex technical machinery.

It's really something watching multi-gigabit traffic patterns subtly shift as new code makes it way through a large production environment. Trucking has its own challenges, but I suspect a part of my heart will always be sitting at a shell, trying to debug some resource contention problem on AWS.