Have you ever seen a tweet like this and wondered what it was?
We’re sending you some giant #HugOps today (and every day), and hope that after reading this you feel inspired to pass on some #HugOps, too.
Hold up…What is HugOps?
Put simply, HugOps is a way to celebrate the human, empathetic side of building, shipping, and running software. It is a take on the word “DevOps” (breaking down silos between Dev and Ops teams through communication, empathy, etc. to ultimately ship faster), but it extends to folks on all different Software, Support, and IT teams. It is a means of acknowledging the real humans working 24/7 to keep the services we rely on running as naturally as water; it exhalts empathy, cross-team collaboration, and trust as the keys to finding problems and shipping solutions faster; and it is a feel good Twitter movement that is much welcomed on a platform that sees its fair share of negativity and trolling. While #HugOps are typically shared during outages, we love the idea of using it when things are going right, too. Like sending flowers or candy or pizza to your friend or partner “just because.”
What better day to start spreading digital hugs than the day of all-the-things-love-and-hearts? This Valentine’s Day we are declaring our love for you, our dear customers. Whether you’re building and shipping software, answering customer questions and troubleshooting their problems, or putting out fires when the inevitable bug creeps in or downtime strikes, we see the often invisible, thankless work y’all put in to keep the internet up and running.
#HugOps in the Wild
If you ever need a pick-me-up, scroll through this feed to go down a happy #HugOps rabbit hole. We’ve collected some of our favorite recent #HugOps tweets that help highlight what what this philosophy is all about:
@pnyak_ showed us that HugOps = empathy + patience:
@joelaha showed us that HugOps matters even in sports:
#hugops to the #SuperBowl halftime show audio engineers that are getting armchair quarterbacked all over Twitter right now. Live events are hard.
— Joe Laha (@joelaha) February 5, 2018
@marcprecipice showed us that there is no outage an Elf gif can’t help:
@elenawashington showed us that HugOps are a nice gift when you’re on call over Christmas: