At 30 years of age, LISA is one of the premier system administration conferences in the world. Each year it hosts hundreds of the best sysadmin and infrastructure minds for nearly a week of in depth tutorials and sessions on the latest technologies and techniques.

When you collect that many brilliant people in one spot you can hardly be surprised by sporadic flashes of creativity. Two years ago several of the attendees decided to collect that creativity into a single event, and thus the DevOps Poetry Slam birds-of-a-feather session was born. Attendees take turns giving dramatic but hilarious readings at an open mic. Commit messages, tweets, brief anecdotes, and bespoke poetry are shared with the audience. The only rules are that the material must be technical in nature and it must not violate the Code of Conduct.

Many of us spend so much time deep in the tech stack that it’s easy to forget we’re creative beings. Therefore, in the spirit and in honor of LISA’s poets, we present our own poetry slam. Contributions were provided by our readers, for our readers. If you’d like to submit your own original work for our next poetry slam, drop us a line!

Introduction written by VM Brasseur. Poems curated by VM Brasseur.

5 poems on the art of DevOps

By Carmen Andoh

[From original tweet]

Anxiety now
Knowledge comes only in parts
Total know? Futile

---

By Chris St. Pierre

[From sonnet:18]

Shall I compare thee to a container?
Thou art more secure and yet more speedy.
“Works on my machine,” quoth some complainer
Who, not reading docs, is much too needy.

Sometime too much the web dev installeth,
Or else crafteth code of such quality
That thrice fortnightly PagerDuty calleth,
Increasing dev-to-ops inequality.

But thy source install requires no Maven;
Nor art thou prey to known-tempfile attacks;
Nor spurn thee this sysadmin unshaven
When complaineth he about chatty AJAX.

  So long as Docker runs, or I code C,
  So long as I’m paged, I give root to thee.

---

By Cassondra Roberts

[From original tweet]

push
to the remote repo.

git pull
into the chaos of code,
ideas and dreams.

make
things real that didn’t exist
yesterday.

---

By David Newson

[From original tweet]

4600 files in the queue,
4600 files,
Take one down, upload it around,
Transfer aborted; connection refused.

---

By Katie McLaughlin and Russell Keith-Magee

Model Django Modelform

[From an idea by Marc Tamlyn; Music by Sir Arthur Sullivan and sheet music compiled by Tim Bell; Original performance on Youtube]

I am the very model of a modern Django modelForm
I handle any language even emoji and Cuniform
My data can be accessed through an elegant and mature ORM
And Rails, Pylons and PHP they look upon me with forlorn.

Some criticize the whitespace in my language with a lot of scorn
But when you are quite used to this you prob’ly think this is the norm
While building sites you’ll prob’ly end up writing lots and lots of views…
To service all the shopping carts and sometimes even read the news.

Your design assets will be safely stored out there in staticfiles
The pretty is completed by the use of some cascading styles
And while I’m out there handling all that emoji and Cuniform
I’m still the very model of a modern Django ModelForm.

And while they’re out there handling all that emoji and Cuniform
They’re still the very model of a modern Django ModelForm.

My models can be entered into any modern database
But really you should use PostGres, like anybody with good taste
Atomic transactions can let me handle failures with good grace
‘i’ eighteen ‘n’ and ‘l’ ten ‘n’ means I can run in any place.

Autoescaping by default helps to stop with all the egg on face
And future errors are prevented with a sturdy testing base
But nothing can protect you from a devop who is feeling smug…
Who edits in production and then introduces nasty bugs.

And that’s why all your sites should have a comprehensive mon’t’ring scheme
Alerting to activities of hackers who are being mean
Yet still I’m out there handling all that emoji and Cuniform
’cause I’m the very model of a modern Django ModelForm

Yet still they’re out there handling all that emoji and Cuniform
’cause they’re the very model of a modern Django ModelForm.

Hopefully you can use me any way that you are wanting to
With comprehensive documents to assist when you have no clue
Supported by a friendly group of worldwide Django users who
Gladly volunteer their time for mentoring and helping you

Whether building up migrations or fig’ring out a classbased view
Or deploying a server on a platform that is very new
I have no doubt that with their help your lovely brand new site will soar
And if you find enough bugs you may find yourself joining the core

Some people want to dump me and are looking for the next cool thing
Yet I am quite excited for the features one point ten will bring
But still I am quite busy handling emoji and Cuniform
Because I am the model of a modern Django ModelForm.

But still they are quite busy handling emoji and Cuniform
Because they are the model of a modern Django ModelForm.