For the Week Ending on Nov 28, 2020
My team at work hit one of the major milestones we had been working on for a while to migrate our Saas customers to a new infrastructure. This is a huge one for us as it had been a steep learning curve for everyone on the team and a strategic organization initiative. We’ve already started operationalizing the new infrastructure and we’ll be carrying out a first upgrade in the coming weekend. I must say, that operationalizing the new infrastructure has not been without hitches and hiccups but I think it helps that we all knew that this was not just going to be a walk in the park and we had deprioritized everything else, to make time for things that could go wrong. The team is quite satisfied and I am happy about that!
I must say that initiatives and changes that affect DevOps and Infrastructure teams usually come without all the bells and whistles that accompany the release of most application features and that’s ok. It’s much weird when team members are all working remotely and you’re wondering:
“ehhh, this the time we’re supposed to scream yippee! and break into a group zanku dance!” 😯 😯
Success usually feels like those moments when you crack a dad joke or just give yourself a high five. it still counts!
Team leads do make effort to educate and enlighten other arms of the organization on the business and money impact of those changes even though they are not tangible or visible.
In retrospect, now that I look back at the DevOps team led by Will Pink when I worked at eHealth Africa, they did not deserve 75% of the hate they got from developers and managers just because no one really got what they were all about. No one understood the challenges they faced, processes they (really) tried to put in place and initiatives they worked on enough to put a business and financial impact on it and eventually decide on their priority. While they were not my primary functional team, I really only started to get some insights into the details of those processes and challenges a few months to mine and Will’s exit from the organization.
I decided to take a pause on content generation for Savvy Within last week. I’ve churned out content on Instagram and Facebook for 2 consecutive weeks now and I’m trying to find a schedule that is both optimal for me and also good enough to serve as a backlog of ideas that I can expound on when I start proper promotion of the Community by next year. I considered that since building the Savvy Within community is not a full-time job for me right now, it’s important that I spend some time exploring a variety of quick topics that I can creatively focus on next year. Content generation will resume this week though.
I had a podcast recording two (2) weeks ago which I started editing last week. This will be the second co-hosted episode on Savvy Within and it’s with one of my friends who we usually make it a mission to exchange our very strong opinions on any and every silly trending matter. We jokingly say that if we complied all our voice messages and shared them with the public, our heads will roll because of the very unpopular nature of the opinions we share, so we decided to record a modest podcast episode together. Recording logistics went better this time and I believe editing will be faster as I learnt a few tricks and tips from editing the first co-hosted episode with Dara Olatoke here.
Finally, on Scolish, we have uploaded the first version of content packs for Ontario’s Science and Technology, Canada & World Studies and Social Studies, Hist & Geo curriculum matched with Virtual Reality (VR) content. They are currently locked on the website and we are going through some final Quality Assurance before we release them to the public and promotion starts. Good times!