🌿 Code as Care: Feminist DevOps and the Future of Infrastructure

Let’s be honest: DevOps culture has spent years worshipping at the altar of speed.

Faster pipelines.

Faster deployments.

Faster incident response.

Faster burnout.

Somewhere along the way, “move fast and break things” became “move fast and break yourself,” and honestly?

I think we’ve had enough.

So today, we’re rewriting the script.

We’re taking DevOps out of the burnout‑industrial complex and into a world where:

• Care is a metric

• repair is a superpower

• Collaboration is culture

• resilience is the goal

• and infrastructure is treated like a houseplant (because if you ignore it, it dies — and if you overwater it, it also dies)

Welcome to Feminist DevOps — the version where we build systems that don’t collapse under pressure and humans who don’t either.

🌸 1. DevOps Has a Hero Problem (And It’s Time to Retire the Cape)

Traditional DevOps still loves the “hero engineer” myth.

You know the one:

• the person who fixes everything at 3 a.m.

• the one who knows every server by heart

• the one who hasn’t taken a holiday since Kubernetes was invented

• the one who says “it’s fine” while quietly dying inside.

Feminist DevOps says:

No more heroics.

More humans.

Because hero culture is just burnout with better branding.

A feminist approach values:

• shared knowledge

• shared responsibility

• shared documentation

• shared snacks during incident calls.

It’s not about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about making sure the room doesn’t fall apart when someone takes a day off.

🌿 2. Infrastructure Is a Houseplant (Yes, Really)

Let’s talk metaphors.

Infrastructure is not a machine.

It’s not a factory.

It’s not a cold, emotionless system.

It’s a houseplant. It needs:

• consistent care

• gentle pruning

• occasional repotting

• sunlight (metaphorically)

• and someone who remembers to water it before it wilts.

Feminist DevOps treats infrastructure like something alive — something that responds to attention, neglect, and the emotional climate of the team. Because when humans are stressed, the systems are stressed. When the humans are supported, the systems thrive. This is not poetry.

This is an operational reality.

🌸 3. Repair Is Not Boring — It’s Revolutionary.

In many tech cultures, repair is invisible work.

It’s not glamorous.

It’s not celebrated.

It doesn’t get you a keynote slot at a conference.

But repair is the backbone of resilience.

Feminist DevOps elevates:

• maintenance

• refactoring

• root‑cause analysis

• documentation

• cleaning up the digital equivalent of “who left this here?”

Repair is not a chore.

Repair is care.

Repair is resistance against the cult of constant acceleration.

And honestly?

Repair is sexy. (Yes, I said it.)

🌿 4. Collaboration Over Chaos DevOps without collaboration is just… Ops.

And Ops without collaboration is just… chaos.

Feminist DevOps builds cultures where:

• no one is punished for asking questions

• no one is shamed for not knowing something

• no one is expected to be a walking encyclopedia

• No one is left alone with a failing system and a prayer.

It’s a world where:

• Pair programming is normal

• knowledge sharing is expected

• documentation is a love language • and meetings don’t feel like gladiator arenas.

This isn’t softness.

This is a strategy.

🌸 5. Resilience Over Scale (Because Scaling a Mess Just Makes a Bigger Mess)

Tech loves scale.

But scaling a fragile system only multiplies fragility.

Feminist DevOps prioritises:

• adaptability

• sustainability

• humane workloads

• systems that degrade gracefully, not catastrophically.

Resilience isn’t built by pushing harder.

It’s built by designing with care.

Think of it like knitting: If one stitch is weak, the whole pattern unravels.

Strength comes from interconnection.

🌿 6. Infrastructure Is Social (Surprise!) Every system is shaped by the people who build it. Every outage affects real humans.

Every design choice has ethical consequences.

Feminist DevOps recognises:

• the emotional labour inside engineering teams

• the social impact of technical decisions

• the need for inclusive processes

• the value of diverse perspectives in preventing failure.

Infrastructure is never neutral. It reflects the culture that creates it. If the culture is toxic, the system will be too.

🌸 7. The Pastel‑Powered Chaos of Real DevOps Let’s be real: DevOps is chaos.

Beautiful chaos.

Terrifying chaos.

The kind of chaos where you’re debugging a pipeline while eating cold noodles at 11 p.m. and whispering, “Please just work.

” Feminist DevOps doesn’t pretend the chaos isn’t there.

It just refuses to let the chaos consume the humans.

It says:

• take breaks

• drink water

• document things

• ask for help

• don’t be a hero

• don’t build systems that require heroes.

It’s DevOps with boundaries. DevOps with compassion. DevOps with a pastel‑coloured sticky note that says “You’re doing great.”

🌿 8. The Bold Feminist Tech Manifesto (Yes, We’re Going There)

Here’s the part where we get loud.

We reject burnout as a badge of honour.

We reject hero culture as a requirement for success.

We reject systems built on exhaustion, exclusion, and ego.

And we choose: Care as architecture.

Repair as a strategy.

Collaboration as culture.

Resilience is the metric that matters.

We choose to build infrastructure that doesn’t break people.

We choose to build teams that don’t collapse under pressure.

We choose to build futures where technology supports life — not drains it.

This is not softness. This isa strength. This is feminist DevOps.

🌸 9. A Closing Thought (Soft, Poetic, and True)

Systems are like ecosystems.

They thrive when tended.

They falter when ignored.

They flourish when the people who care for them are supported, valued, and heard. Feminist DevOps is not a trend.

It’s a return to something ancient: the idea that care is not optional — it’s foundational. And if we build our infrastructure the way we tend to gardens, forests, and oceans — with patience, attention, and respect — then maybe, just maybe, our systems will grow into something resilient enough to hold the future.