I’ve written before how my job has helped teach me some valuable lessons that applied to parenting. The technology I interact with on a daily basis, the processes and frameworks we use, and the lessons I’ve learned managing a team have all inspired me to apply these to how I’m raising my kids. I’ve brought home A/B testing, machine learning, and agile practices to help learn and become a better dad.

Devops, the software development methodology in which engineers are not only responsible for architecting and building software, but also infrastructure and operational tasks like fleet management, logging, and monitoring, can teach parents a lot about how to educate their children and be better partners in their development. In this process, developers take on additional roles and responsibilities from typical IT responsibilities in an effort to improve the end to end quality and speed of delivery of features for users.

Get ready for a long, nerdy post with lots of coding and even more configuration. Don’t worry, I did it in a few nights, so anyone can. Pretty much every night, my wife asks, is the Nest still on? It’s freezing in here. Due to our setup, and hopefully not sedentary lifestyle, the downstairs Nest often things we aren’t home when we’re on the couch, and goes into a balmy 55 degree away mode.

Reminder, this blog represents my own opinions only and is on no way affiliated with my employer, Audible or Amazon. Still I think these thoughts are pretty common. In 2014, I moved from a software development role on my team to managing it. During the time since, I slowly began to write less code, made a concerted effort to contribute on some projects, pick up bug fixes on critical projects, help with low severity issues, and do some side projects.