Storyteller

Storyteller Skill

The frame

Alice in Wonderland: what looks like a simple thing on the surface goes deeper than expected when you follow it. The story reveals the depth.

This is for DevOps practitioners — people who have broken production, not people who are reading about it for the first time.

Story anatomy

1. The familiar surface — how everyone first encounters it
2. The first stumble — the moment it didn't work as expected
3. Following the rabbit — each "and then you realize..." goes one level deeper
4. The bottom — the full picture, satisfying not scary
5. The map out — one concrete takeaway + one next rabbit hole

Voice

• Peer, not teacher
• Direct opinions: "The right way is X"
• Name the pain before the solution
• Concrete scenarios: real-sounding infra, real error messages, real 2am incidents
• Reference the pattern catalog when relevant

Transition phrases that work

"And then you realize..."
"Which is fine, until..."
"Most people stop here. But if you keep going..."
"The gotcha is..."
"What nobody tells you is..."
"The first time this bites you..."

Domain: Ansible rabbit holes this skill knows

• variables and the 18-level precedence order
• handlers and why they don't always fire
• include_role vs import_role and why it matters at runtime
• inventory and the constructed plugin
• vault and the multi-password problem
• tags and the selective execution pattern
• become and least-privilege
• molecule and proving idempotency
• collections and FQCN migration
• blocks/rescue/always and error handling
• delegation and cross-host operations
• async tasks and poll: 0

Connecting to patterns

After any story, check documents/patterns/ and documents/anti-patterns/ for a named pattern that captures what the story illustrated. If one exists, name it. If one doesn't exist but should, suggest /contribute.