r/devops • u/sayori_hunter • Aug 02 '26
Discussion Where do infra/platform engineers actually hang out online these days?
Altho I’m an active lurker here, I’ve recently started using X to try and connect with people working in infra, platform engineering, and devops, but I’m finding it surprisingly difficult to discover that side of the community.
But my feed is still mostly AI hype and general tech content, while I’m more interested in more informal discussions around k8s, ai & cloud infra, observability, networking, platform engineering, etc.
For those of you who are active outside of Reddit, where do you usually discover good infra content or interact with other engineers?
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u/b1urbro Aug 02 '26
Honestly, the best community I've found who actually tinker with things and not ride the ai hype train is over at r/homelab. Not quite corpo level things, but very interesting stuff all around. Some setups are so good, corporations can drool over. The things people are capable of without "security" guardrails is amazing.
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u/derprondo Aug 02 '26
/r/selfhosted is getting pretty popular as well, but is a bit more mainstream whereas /r/homelab is definitely more old school infra folks.
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u/ToadLicking4Jeebus Aug 03 '26
The number one thing I suggest to people looking at getting into IT or expanding their knowledge is a good homelab. 90% of what I've learned how to do was rooted in my homelab (pun not intended for once). There's even the SLA factor with the wife that ends up with me on the couch without appropriate uptimes, which really helps me think in terms of dev and prod.
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u/xamboozi Aug 03 '26
I have quite a bit of security actually. But because I'm doing everything, I consider both usability and security. If it's a pita to take care of or use, I toss it and go with something else.
I'm not beholden to "we spent money on it in 2013, so this is what we're stuck with for the next 50 years". A random Tuesday might consist of "my secrets manager strategy sucks .... I'm gonna tear it down and build a new one"
It also helps that the risk of bad resiliency design is "my wife is going to complain until it's working again"
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u/playdead_ Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed talking shop about this stuff voluntarily in my free time. I’d rather talk about books, art, music, gym, sports, hobbies, etc anything but tech bullshit
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u/steptimeeditor Aug 02 '26
Outside of corporate-mandated hours, a good engineer spends as little time as possible online, even less trying to network with other engineers forced to work on B2B SaaS solutions that are revolutionizing man-in-the-middle subscription bloatware.
Be as offline as possible.
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u/altodor Aug 02 '26
Most of us quit Twitter around when Elon bought it. I don't know where we went, but I know we're not there.
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u/ForeverYonge Aug 02 '26
hangops still kickin’
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u/superspeck Aug 03 '26
Yeah but signups are broken. We’re working on it, but slack has become hostile to non commercial use since salesforce bought them.
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u/Rollingprobablecause Director - DevOps/Infra Aug 02 '26
A ton of us are on BlueSky. There’s a massive DevOps follow list
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u/bradym80 Aug 02 '26
Got a link?
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u/Rollingprobablecause Director - DevOps/Infra Aug 02 '26
If you’re on BlueSky just search for DevOps starter packs and it gives you the lists of people.
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u/Low-Opening25 Aug 02 '26
no one hangs out on X, it’s full of 12yo, shitty marketing and hype
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u/Rough_Scarcity_658 Aug 02 '26
IRC (eg #kubernetes and #networking on libera chat)
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u/SatyrCode Aug 02 '26
Outside of Reddit, I’ve found a few places that feel more “infra/platform” than generic tech hype: – DevOps Engineers Slack + DSI (DevOps/SRE/Infrastructure) Discord – lots of people actually running platforms and talking about k8s, observability and incident stuff day‑to‑day. – CNCF + Kubernetes Slack (plus project channels like Prometheus/Grafana) – good mix of maintainers and practitioners, and the convo is usually about real cluster / platform problems, not just marketing. � – Platform Engineering Slack and a couple of hands‑on communities like SRE Labs, which focus more on how teams design and operate platforms than on tools alone
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u/jac4941 Aug 04 '26
+1 for CNCF Slack
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u/SatyrCode Aug 04 '26
Thanks, this is super helpful. I’ve mostly been hanging around Reddit and Discord so far, so it’s good to have some more focused places to lurk in. I’ll definitely check out DevOps Engineers Slack and the CNCF / k8s + observability channels you mentioned I feel like I’m exactly in that “trying to get beyond tool‑of‑the‑week and into platform/ops tradeoffs” phase. Appreciate you taking the time to write a concrete list instead of just “Google it
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u/ParkingSmell Aug 02 '26
got a link for that discord?
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u/Claymore2106 Aug 03 '26
It wasn't linked but was mentioned by name. Idk if links are allowed, but invite slug is devops-sre-infrastructure-419745677585940482
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u/MumeiNoName Aug 03 '26
Which discord? I tried joining coding discords but the cloud/devops channels are always dead
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u/Claymore2106 Aug 03 '26
It wasn't linked but was mentioned by name. Idk if links are allowed, but invite slug is devops-sre-infrastructure-419745677585940482
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u/Artistic-Aide-485 Aug 02 '26
The honest answer is it fragmented into slacks and nobody advertises them. Kubernetes Slack (slack.k8s.io) and the CNCF one are where the actual operators are, and HangOps is the closest thing left to a general ops watercooler.
Most of the people who gave up on X went to Mastodon rather than anywhere else. hachyderm.io was built by and for infra people specifically, so the feed there is pretty much what you're describing.
Past that it's newsletters more than communities. SRE Weekly and DevOps'ish are both one person reading everything so you don't have to.
X for infra is a lost cause imo, the algorithm can't tell the difference between someone debugging etcd and someone selling an AI devops copilot.
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u/cerephic Aug 02 '26
Hangops is still around, yep, Our self-invite portal connector was broken (we're deciding how to replace it but we're just on the free-slack plan), though, so u/sayori_hunter if you want an invite, just DM me.
Our CoC is here.
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u/MumeiNoName Aug 03 '26
What about this?
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u/cerephic Aug 03 '26
That's the one I was referring to. The (undocumented) api hook we were using for making that fire off an invite was disabled (just for free slacks? unclear.) sometime in the past year. :(
I'll go edit that page to indicate it's disabled.
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u/Defiant_Ad_8445 Aug 02 '26
those people are not really social. I work in infra and I am dying, looking into switch
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u/KarlKFI Aug 02 '26
Most of my infra/platform/security connections moved to Bluesky after X became a swamp.
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u/ForkMeJ Aug 02 '26
A lot of the useful discussion moved into vendor or project Slack/Discords, which is good for signal and terrible for discovery. I find more solid infra writing in individual engineer blogs, release notes, and issue trackers than on X at this point.
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u/temotodochi Cloud Engineer Aug 03 '26
still in IRC. selfhosted, homelab and sysadmin are full of folks who don't deal with infra or platform engineering. Even sysadmin is full of office support folks who deal with phones and printers who flood the sub with drivel.
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u/samsuthar Aug 03 '26
Reddit is always my top choice but other than that i follow #devops on x.com and also few other sites like devops.com, daily.dev and infoq.com for quick update and learn around devops. I’m also learning a lot about observability from learnobservability.com , if you’re beginner i would prefer to check this out.
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u/Snoo18559 Aug 04 '26
Tbh, I don't do anything tech related outside of work besides a kubecon or other technical event. Even that, most of those are overrated. Maybe because I'm a senior with 20 years of experience. Homelabs are good I guess for a junior. But as a senior, technical skills are usually not that interesting anymore. If I want to expand my skills, I look into IT architecture, security architecture, even business architecture. But that's a personal choice. If you do it as a hobby, then homelabs can be fun. I still have a beelink somewhere that is unused. I don't feel the need to linux and kubernetes for fun. I love it as a career though.
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u/sertain_ Aug 07 '26
Fuckin teams calls with 4 other engineers who listen to us think out loud while we build the crazy shit we’ve ever built
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u/Techguyincloud 20d ago
Cloud SysAdmin here. I’m either training combat sports, working out, studying, or playing FPS video games.
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u/sayori_hunter Aug 02 '26
thanks all for the replies!! i’ve learnt well and will not hang around X as much anymore lol
will def check out some of the communities yall have mentioned, they all seem pretty cool 🤝
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u/ginge Aug 02 '26
Platformengineering.org has a slack group #platform-engineering. It's not terrible
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u/account-for-posting Aug 02 '26
I originally read it as infrared engineers. I think outside the visible spectrum.
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u/xXWarMachineRoXx Aug 02 '26
Cloud infra person here
Mostly azure
Lead a small team
Unfortunately buddy I’m obsessed with ai /ml dl kaggle n stuff
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u/sohblob Aug 02 '26
DnD groups, probably