The U.S. military is known for quite a few things, including its excessive and fascinating use of acronyms, euphemisms, and colorful phrases to describe certain situations. But many of these terms are applicable to other areas of life, including many non-military jobs.
Following are five phrases from the armed forces that I think DevOps practitioners should adopt.
"Good Idea Fairy"
According to the Urban Dictionary[1], a Good Idea Fairy is "an evil mythical creature that whispers advice and ideas into the ears of military leadership causing hundreds [of] unnecessary changes and countless wasted man-hours every year."
I discussed the Good Idea Fairy in "What the military taught me about DevOps[2]." The best example of the Good Idea Fairy in DevOps is when someone wants to use a new tool that offers no new functionality nor improvement. This happens more often than you realize. Sometimes new tools will result in new and improved functionality. But, if no one uses that functionality, what good is taking the time to implement it? DevOps is about getting the job done with the right tool now while being mindful of the future. If it's time to retool, do it. Otherwise, resist that "new DevOps tool" someone read about on Hacker News.Another example is when leadership decides that your well-trained developers are going to code in a different language. Or your infrastructure is well-managed with Ansible and, for no reason, everything has to be ported over to Terraform. That's insane, yes, but I've seen it happen. The Good Idea Fairy is not your friend in DevOps (or in life for that matter).
"Hurry up and wait."
The urge to rush to the airport so you can get through security