This past week I've had a chance to reflect on 2 different projects I've been involved with at opposite ends of the lockdown.

At the beginning of Level 4, just before the lock-down, I was contacted to help out with what would end up being the NZ Governments WhatsApp channel.

The technology involved for the solution required some in-depth knowledge of cloud technology, container orchestration platform kubernetes, a secrets management CLI (command line interface), monitoring and dashboard building and deployment methods and configuration.

I'm not a great reader.

I still read with a voice in my head. I often have to re-read the page I'm on because I have a short attention span and my mind wanders easily. My wife has long suspected I have ADHD. I just think I get bored easily.

But all of these things -- attention span, reading, not having ADHD (jokes) -- are things that can get better with practice. I believe so anyway.

With the free time I have with the lock-down I decided I want to be a "better reader" (whatever that means).

I have to be honest, this side project journey isn't going how I had imagined.

I know its only been a few weeks, but I had an expectation that by now, mid March, I would be well on my way with my MVP. A small demo of the infrastructure setup, robustness and observability built on at least 1 of 2 cloud providers.

But what have I got to show so far?

It's been a busy work at work, but definitely a grind to make progress on the infrastructure code this week. And the balancing act between work and the side hustle has cost me a bit of sleep. Nothing I'm not already used to being a career computer geek - staying up late trying to make something work, or playing with some new tech, or surfing tech twitter is standard operating procedure.

I've been doing infrastructure in some way for a while now. I started with Linux System Administration, web servers, setting up routers, switches and how the network is setup to feed all devices that live there. Working on cloud infrastructure itself is relatively new for me but then again, its the same thing...

what's the saying?

"Cloud is just someone else's servers."

Failing to Start​

I'm at a point in my career, and life in general where I find myself failing to start.

To start the side project, or business or venture. I started a blog a couple years back to document and log the various tech things I'd work on. I then added to the technical blog with my thoughts & musings on my career in I.T., and the experiences I've had.

But despite the things I've done, there's a lot more that I wanted to do, but have always found some reason not to pull the trigger. So, its now 2020,and I'm going to start.

Holidays and Contracting​

It's that time of year again when companies ramp up a little crazier as teams try to get any work in before a brown out (aka change freeze). A change freeze is where companies will freeze all changes to production, or production-affecting systems in order to provider stability over the coming break as staff will be taking time away from these systems at the same time customers may be ramping up their use as they take time off work to get the all important last minute xmas shopping done.

The last thing the company wants is a bad customer experience during these emotional... I mean festive times, due to systems crashing, and then a slower than usual response because Greg, who usually fixes things in an hour is away up north with the family, and Joe hasn't fixed this issue before and it takes him 4 x as long.

In recent times the issue of leadership has been a factor in the quality and felt experience of projects I have been across in my contracting career. These have ranged from feeling like everyone's a leader, having their own say and ideas on where the project should be going, to completely zero ideas on what the team is doing and everyone suddenly wants to know what the floor looks like when they're asked who's supposed to be doing what.

I'm not 100% sure "Where I was when cloud became a thing", but I clearly remember life before cloud and life as it is now. It's a cloud world. And we're all just trying to figure out what that means for most of us and the companies we work for.

I never worked in a data centre, and had to contend with installing rack mounted servers. Build and configure them, patch them into the network and get them the all clear to be used by whichever company had ordered them. I mean, I did this on my home lab with ex-lease rack mounted serversto learn etc.

Projects have a lot of moving parts. This definitely includes the technology landscape (understatement of the year), but also a big human resource factor as well. I think if you've followed any of my writing and experiences you'll know that "people" are (always) often the big under-estimated factor in my whole I.T. career - but that's probably a post for another time.