Mat Kovach is a DevOps engineer and engineering manager who’s been around long enough to know that every “new paradigm” eventually circles back to the same human problems. He writes Half-Fast DevOps (Half Fast DevOps), a quietly skeptical take on modern engineering culture, less hype, more history, and a strong belief that mentoring beats tooling every time. His work focuses on the unglamorous parts of DevOps that actually matter: teaching, judgment, and building systems that survive both scale and people, and scale is the easy part. When he’s not shipping infrastructure, he’s questioning why we keep learning the same lessons the hard way and researching baseball history.