We're not developers!

I have been building, growing, and managing DevOps teams for several years now. In the beginning, DevOps teams were typically formed with code-savvy system administrators. I do not recall the exact topic, but we were discussing roles and responsibilities in our newly formed team. Someone raised a question, and I responded with something similar to As developers, we have a responsibility to...

Someone interjected. Developers?!

Point well made. Afterall, no one on the team had an official developer title. Everyone had titles like system administrator or database administrator or some variant. I made the correction and continued on. As admins, we have a responsibility to...

Looking back, I consider my original statement to be correct. Even though no one had a developer title, we were still writing code. The only major distinction was that our code made infrastructure, services, and resources materialize instead of apps and features. We were not creating a web UI or app logic, but the foundation to allow that code to run. It was just as important. As such, we need to adhere to those same best practices. Gone are the days of point in time manual builds. It's all about continuity and efficiency with constant iterations, code re-use, and frequent deployments.

In a sense, we are all developers.