Over my two decades as an infrastructure engineer, I’ve watched our field transform dramatically. What began with manual server configuration has evolved into defining entire organizations infrastructure as code. This journey reflects not just technological change, but a complete shift in how we approach managing systems at scale. I’ve been in the trenches through most of it, and I want to share my story of this evolution with fellow infrastructure engineers who’ve lived through similar transitions.

On the day of my birthday, I wondered (of course - as many us do), if this is my start date, what is the to origin story of the birth date of computer time?

The Unix epoch, defined as 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970, serves as the foundational reference point for timekeeping in nearly all modern computing systems. This date, though seemingly arbitrary, emerged from a confluence of technical constraints, historical decisions, and practical considerations during Unix’s early development.