It might seem hard to believe, but there was once a time when computers were exciting. Not because of what they could get us, but just because of what they were.
Way back in the days of glowing vacuum tubes, of punch cards and terminals, the first computer enthusiasts, the OG nerds, the hackers (before that word became twisted and cynical), weren’t just using systems — they were communing with them. Dreaming in machine code. Waking up with answers the manuals didn’t hold. Understanding every layer. Not because they had to, but because they needed to.
They were explorers. Not of deserts or oceans, but of logic, memory, and silicon. Working late into the night, they sneaked into rooms full of mainframes, they reverse-engineered operating systems. Their revolution wasn’t about profit. It was about freedom, curiosity, and the unshakable belief that systems should be understood, modified, and made better. It was about sharing. Above all, it was about the belief that systems could and should be understood. And that understanding was a path to freedom.
What It Meant to Be a Hacker
🧠 Obsession, not obligation
They weren’t learning to get a job. They were learning because they needed to. Because not knowing how something worked kept them up at night until they knew how it worked. Hacking wasn’t a profession, it fit on a line between passion and obsession. They weren’t optimising revenue, they were learning, to understand and express. Their goals were:
- Elegant code
- Systems that were alive with possibility
- Knowledge for its own sake
They’d write entire operating systems from scratch, just to prove it could be done better.
🛠️ Computers were not tools — they were playgrounds
Every line of code was a doorway. Every terminal prompt was a challenge. The hardware was crude and unforgiving, yet somehow the experience was so alive. Every change felt immediate (even when they had to wait hours for their programs to run), powerful (even when their machines had none of the power of today), and deeply personal (even when owning their own computer was unimaginable).
A flicker on the screen was a response from a machine they had tamed. Line by line, byte by byte.
🔓 Access was sacred
They followed the Hacker Ethic — a radical code of curiosity that held:
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Access to computers — and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works — should be unlimited and total.
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Information wants to be free.
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Mistrust authority; promote decentralization.
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Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
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You can create art and beauty on a computer.
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Computers can change your life for the better.
This wasn’t just about programming. It was a new way of life, with a philosophy, an ethic, and a dream.
🤖 The system was the puzzle
They wanted to know how it all fit together — from the CPU’s instruction set to the OS’s scheduling algorithm. They didn’t trust black boxes. They opened them. They rewired them.
⚔️ Rebellion through mastery
They didn’t vandalize. They remade. They pushed systems beyond what their creators intended. They weren’t content with “works as designed” — they were obsessed with “how does it do that?”, and “what else can it do?”
These were not users. These were builders. Benders of logic. Artists of machine language.
🧬 In short, being a hacker meant:
- Disassembling what others took for granted.
- Asking deeper questions, asking how they could learn and understand.
- Hands-on experience.
- Caring more about elegance than expedience.
Those early hackers weren’t just coding, they were pioneering. They were unlocking what felt like a new form of reality, with its own logic, its own physics.
They weren’t chasing quarterly metrics or building ad-tech platforms. They were in love with what computers could be — how they could think, extend the mind, simulate ideas, even become art. That’s a very different energy to much of today’s tech scene.
They were doing something meaningful — even romantic.
What Happened Then?
The magic faded.
Computers got faster. More powerful. More convenient.
But also more corporate. More abstract. More locked down.
Giant companies built the cloud, and locked the keys inside data centers.
DevOps was born to optimize delivery, to maximize efficiency, productivity, and ROI. We got:
YAML for Configuration.
YAML for Kubernetes.
YAML for CI/CD.
YAML to build, test, and deploy.
It works.
It scales.
It gets the job done.
But somewhere along the way, someone stopped, and asked:
Where has the feeling gone?
Much of the tech world now feels like:
- It’s dominated by huge corporations.
- It’s layered with abstraction upon abstraction.
- We solve problems by gluing things together, not creating something fundamental.
- Success is defined by dollars rather than insight.
Sometimes it even feels like most of the people came here for the money, and not for the love.
Full Circle
In a strange way, we’ve come full circle.
Back in the 1950s and 60s, only governments and huge organisations could afford a computer. They filled entire rooms and cost millions (back in the day when millions was like billions).
Today, we call it the cloud.
Once again, only the giants own the machines where the real action is. Only they see the bare metal. Only they write the schedulers, tweak the kernels, and build the hypervisors. Everyone else just rents a dozen layers of abstraction.
We’ve gone from terminals to Terraform, but the dynamic is eerily familiar.
What once was a time-sharing mainframe is now a managed service. What once required the sysadmin’s approval and a budget now requires a credit card and a budget. Access without ownership. Execution without understanding.
Rebel YAML is about reclaiming that understanding.
The Ritual Without the Understanding
YAML can be seen as symbolic of a kind of cargo cult engineering:
- Cut and paste from Stack Overflow or LLMs.
- Change a value or two.
- Hope the incantation summons the desired compute gods.
This encourages:
- Blind repetition, not comprehension.
- Fear of deviation, because the system is brittle and works by voodoo.
- A fragile sense of control, where changing one indent might bring the whole thing crashing down.
- The recursive loop of defeat, because you can’t buy understanding, meaning, and wonder — you have to seek it, and journey towards it, while living within it.
What Is Rebel YAML?
Rebel YAML is the refusal to accept “Infrastructure as Voodoo.”
It’s a reminder that beneath the abstraction, something real is happening — and you can understand it.
- What does the OS actually do when you define a container?
- What really happens when your CI/CD “just works”?
- Could you build it yourself?
- And why wouldn’t you want to?
Rebel YAML isn’t about copying templates.
It’s about questioning assumptions.
Debugging the hard way.
Building the long way.
Learning what people skip over.
Configuration is not comprehension.
YAML is the surface, not the substance.
The stack speaks louder than Slack.
Once upon a time, in a world where giant, faceless organisations owned and controlled technology, there were people who sought, and proved, that tech could be understood and mastered by people.
Now, that time is here again.
This blog is a field guide for the curious.
For those who want to know what their systems are really doing.
For those who still see magic in the machine.
Infrastructure as Understanding.
The first step is to seek it.
Welcome.