A handy cheatsheet to help you know if you’re making a terrible mistake.

If the answer to any of the following questions are “yes”, please take a moment to reconsider:

General/Career

Are you…

• Accepting equity in lieu of cash as your primary revenue stream?
• Accepting “free” food in lieu of cash?
• Accepting a job with any of the following words in the title: “rockstar”, “ninja”, “guru”, “cloud”?
• Pursuing a romantic relationship a coworker?
• Replying to all?

Software Development

Are you…

• Creating a in-house framework?
• Writing your own configuration management solution?
• Creating a “generator” for your internal microservices?
• Making slides for a conference talk about a thing you’ve never deployed to production?
• Writing a bespoke org-wide monitoring/analytics/logging library?
• Downloading dependencies from the Internet on every build?

IT/Operations

Are you…

• Purchasing a “DevOps solution”?
• Modifying a popular tool to work more like a different tool you’re more familiar with?
• Doing something that requires ruby to run on Windows?
• Generating configuration management code?
• “Re-doing” prod after watching a tech talk?

Project Management

Are you…

• Moving a project to JIRA?
• Using more than one instance of JIRA at the same time?
• Using more than on JIRA instance at the same time, and writing code to link/migrate/sync content between instances?
• Switching away from a working platform or service to another service because it integrates more deeply with JIRA?
• Any of the above, but with Confluence?