DevOps news is dominated by discussions about tools, and with good reason. It's not unusual for the amount of infrastructure-related code in a system to approach or even exceed the amount of code dedicated to the actual problem the system is solving, even in small systems. As our systems scale in size and complexity, we invest an ever increasing amount of resources into building solutions to help manage our our complex technical systems. And rightly so.

What's often overlooked, however, is the human component of our systems. All too often our approaches to tools, processes, and systems management attempt to remove humans rather than empower them.

I'll make the case that humans are not a source of entropy to be safeguarded against in our systems, but rather a fundamental source of resilience and even efficiency. We'll discuss ways that we can use this point of view to our advantage when constructing our systems to move faster without sacrificing safety. We'll look at things like tools and our interactions with them, team collaboration, and even organizational structure and policies.

We've had plenty of talks about building for web scale, cloud scale, and even planetary scale. Let's spend some time talking about designing for human scale.