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2015 In Review - Work
I hardly know where to start on 2015...
Workwise, it was a see-saw year. Because of management & staffing issues going back to late 2014, I had had enough by March. My team of six was whittled down to a team of two (soon to be one), the powers-that-be were delaying the replacement of our failing storage array, and our product line seemed to be in utter disarray. In short, it was ugly and my work life had become a daily struggle to get out of bed.
I got myself certified for Amazon Web Services to add to & freshen my resume. I interviewed at several places, turned down a couple of offers as they didn't seem a good fit for me for sundry reasons, and talked with a lot of recruiters to see what was going on out in the world. In all, there were many opportunities if I needed a job immediately.
Then I did something which was outside of my normal comfort zone: I telephoned our new CTO directly to tell him precisely how ugly things had become for me and my team, and to ask him to make a case why I shouldn't turn in my resignation in the next few business days. And to my surprise, he listened and we had a good discussion.
The CTO had only been on the job for approximately four weeks at that point so the various problems were not his fault; he asked me for three months so he could prove himself and make improvements. If after 90 days things were still ugly, he'd accept my resignation and wish me well.
And he did exactly what he promised. Some of the easier issues were tackled quickly, some took a few weeks and the hiring of new team members took closer to four months, but he did address everything I brought to him. Even the storage array issue was tackled: a test unit for our non-production systems was purchased within the three month period, and a proper larger unit for Production was purchased later in the year. My team is now up to three bodies. We've tightened our procedures for ticket review & execution. We've invested in automation of trivial matters. We shut down an unprofitable division of the firm, giving my team new hardware to replace the aging & failing components we loathed.
So here I am at the end of 2015, wrapping up my seventh year working for Deem (formerly Rearden Commerce), and I'm content to stay where I am. The pay is good, I feel valued & useful, and there are many learning opportunities for new tech. Life is good.
The past month has required some ridiculous working hours, but all is good. The old storage array went off support at the end of September, and we had been gradually losing hard drives since then. As I write this, there are eight dead drives in that machine. We do have the new storage array however so I had been working weekends & nights to migrate the critical data off the old Fujitsu array onto the new Fujitsu one. There is still a lot of data to move, but the most critical parts are done so I can sleep nights once again.
I haven't spent this much time in storage area networks in years, or in Veritas clustering & volume management. All of these things however are useful for maintaining a marketable skillset.
We've also been stepping up the virtualization of applications in our production & non-production systems. We had used the "vserver" package previously to do virtualization on Linux, but it didn't have memory, disk, or CPU usage restrictions. That package wasn't supported in later versions of Ubuntu Linux so we've migrated to Xen for virtualization. A large part of my summer was spent moving apps over to Xen guests but 230+ apps later, it's nearly done. If we didn't have an end-of-year production freeze, I would have finished up everything this month.
In the coming year, I need to finish migrating data off the old storage array, then figure out how to dispose of three refrigerator-sized cabinets of disks. The old traffic balancers will be phased out in favour of F5 units. I finish our migration off old Ubuntu and older RedHat Linux platforms into Ubuntu 14 and Xen. And there will be many other little things which pop up periodically. It never ends --and that's a good thing for my bank account.
As of today, I have 4,200 days left until retirement. Sweet!
Workwise, it was a see-saw year. Because of management & staffing issues going back to late 2014, I had had enough by March. My team of six was whittled down to a team of two (soon to be one), the powers-that-be were delaying the replacement of our failing storage array, and our product line seemed to be in utter disarray. In short, it was ugly and my work life had become a daily struggle to get out of bed.
I got myself certified for Amazon Web Services to add to & freshen my resume. I interviewed at several places, turned down a couple of offers as they didn't seem a good fit for me for sundry reasons, and talked with a lot of recruiters to see what was going on out in the world. In all, there were many opportunities if I needed a job immediately.
Then I did something which was outside of my normal comfort zone: I telephoned our new CTO directly to tell him precisely how ugly things had become for me and my team, and to ask him to make a case why I shouldn't turn in my resignation in the next few business days. And to my surprise, he listened and we had a good discussion.
The CTO had only been on the job for approximately four weeks at that point so the various problems were not his fault; he asked me for three months so he could prove himself and make improvements. If after 90 days things were still ugly, he'd accept my resignation and wish me well.
And he did exactly what he promised. Some of the easier issues were tackled quickly, some took a few weeks and the hiring of new team members took closer to four months, but he did address everything I brought to him. Even the storage array issue was tackled: a test unit for our non-production systems was purchased within the three month period, and a proper larger unit for Production was purchased later in the year. My team is now up to three bodies. We've tightened our procedures for ticket review & execution. We've invested in automation of trivial matters. We shut down an unprofitable division of the firm, giving my team new hardware to replace the aging & failing components we loathed.
So here I am at the end of 2015, wrapping up my seventh year working for Deem (formerly Rearden Commerce), and I'm content to stay where I am. The pay is good, I feel valued & useful, and there are many learning opportunities for new tech. Life is good.
The past month has required some ridiculous working hours, but all is good. The old storage array went off support at the end of September, and we had been gradually losing hard drives since then. As I write this, there are eight dead drives in that machine. We do have the new storage array however so I had been working weekends & nights to migrate the critical data off the old Fujitsu array onto the new Fujitsu one. There is still a lot of data to move, but the most critical parts are done so I can sleep nights once again.
I haven't spent this much time in storage area networks in years, or in Veritas clustering & volume management. All of these things however are useful for maintaining a marketable skillset.
We've also been stepping up the virtualization of applications in our production & non-production systems. We had used the "vserver" package previously to do virtualization on Linux, but it didn't have memory, disk, or CPU usage restrictions. That package wasn't supported in later versions of Ubuntu Linux so we've migrated to Xen for virtualization. A large part of my summer was spent moving apps over to Xen guests but 230+ apps later, it's nearly done. If we didn't have an end-of-year production freeze, I would have finished up everything this month.
In the coming year, I need to finish migrating data off the old storage array, then figure out how to dispose of three refrigerator-sized cabinets of disks. The old traffic balancers will be phased out in favour of F5 units. I finish our migration off old Ubuntu and older RedHat Linux platforms into Ubuntu 14 and Xen. And there will be many other little things which pop up periodically. It never ends --and that's a good thing for my bank account.
As of today, I have 4,200 days left until retirement. Sweet!
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