Roadmap: Evergreen Skills For Working With Servers

Developers change web technologies with relentless speed and without much consideration for those who might be “left behind.” Every week there’s a new “flavor of the month” CSS/JavaScript framework, deployment strategy, or programming language. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype+growth upswing, only to get left in the dark once the industry moves on to the next big thing. But what about the skills that haven’t faded in their usefulness, even with all these changes? Which will still be relevant one, five, or 20 years from now? Which are “evergreen” to the future of working with servers? Enter the roadmap of evergreen skills for working with servers. A few caveats before we dive into the roadmap itself. 1. This is by no means comprehensive. I’m sure I missed a lot. If you’d like to help fill in the gaps, see #4. 2. These are suggestions, not requirements. 3. Many skills have dozens of sub-skills. Toward the end of the roadmap, I mention configuration management as an evergreen skill, if only because it’s a way of thinking/behaving that isn’t connected to any specific tools or type of deployment. But if you look at things another way, configuration management is just one tiny piece of a bigger DevOps roadmap, despite being enormously complex itself. What makes a skill evergreen is not your mastery of a certain tool, but rather your understanding of why a certain way of thinking is