In the last four years, platform engineering has grown like nothing I have ever seen. My writings on DevOps burnout, cognitive load, and, infamously, DevOps is dead have reached millions of people. As much as I’d love to say it’s because my memes are so funny, or my posts are so well written, the reality is that the topic of DevEx truly resonates with people so deeply.

Since 2000, the number of technologies a dev must learn has skyrocketed as the culture of shifting left has pushed ever more onto their plate. Devs are hammered not just by the pressure of learning an ever-increasing number of new tools, but also by the brutal context-switching of handling more and more complex tools and technologies in parallel. This is the key driver in the doom loop of DevOps burnout