Do you have the skills+time+interest to join the Tech Ops team?

I'm a sysadmin/developer and would love to help however I can.

It's been a few months since we discussed doing some custom development. I had more time available then, and I set myself to work on a blog and other things. The problem I found was that I'm not a DevOps guy. Whilst I understand and use Docker and the development cycle, it was very difficult for me to get anything done because of lack of documented architecture and spotty information available. It's nobody's fault, it's just how my brain works, I find it far, far less challenging to do technical work if the platform information is documented and available, instead of having to demand it on a per-case basis using a conversational process over chat.

Systems Administration is a difficult, demanding, and often unrewarding task, so it's totally understood that you guys have been doing excellent, world class work and a labour of love and us users and hanger outs should only be extremely grateful for everything you do.

That being said, I think that in order to bring people on board, there needs to be a rather detailed documentation of the architecture as it stands, especially since it's an evolving lifeform with increasing complexity. I think that documentation is a game blocker here, if you bring more people on board without an onboarding process in place, your work will be twice as hard repeating the process of teaching them every detaila and chatting for days and days every time a new tech person arrives, and they will always be lacking the level of detail required to do outstanding technical work. That method just doesn't work, and it will become impossible to maintain if the number of technical people increases. That's not a flaw in the teaching, it's that teaching person-to-person is not scalable and it's subject to time availability, reliability of the memory, and energies of the people who already have the knowledge.

I think it would be wise to at least consider the possibility of doing this documentation work first, before bringing any more people on board without a well-defined technical onboarding process. I think the lack of documentation and tech onboarding is a roadblocker here.

If you prepare a technical onboarding process furnished with detailed technical documentation, you will be able to get more programmers, sysadmins, devops, and other technical people with a predictable playground, well-defined boundaries, and the capability to take in more hands and brains to contribute more in parallel. And you won't have to ever do the (tiring, irregular, unpredictable) initial training ever again, because others will be prepared to answer questions and keep updating the tech knowledgebase so that everyone on baord is on the same page.

Much love and good vibes to you.

Thank you Horatio, I completely agree! We discussed this during the last tech call, and documentation is our first priority.