Yesterday’s Reflection - Contentment and Work has a second-part this morning. As I was wrapping up a project I didn’t realize the closed-off-ness of leaving… I handed in some notes, and mid-message to someone the clock struck midnight and I was locked out. It’s fitting to be honest, and now in the wake of yesterday’s contentment post, experiencing some more loss than I expected, today we forge ahead.
My main focus for work now is a project I will refer to as forge. It is what
I will bring to Caterpillar Autonomy but I can only build it thanks to the
gifts and experience God has given me. The thing I want to put on paper is a
short list of experiences I think God in his sovereignty, gave me over the last
few years and what they provide for me for Forge.
Cat Reman Platform #
One of the first things that comes to mind is another project I was sad to lose: a platform I started for an analytics team in Cat Reman. That began as a simple python cli to automate some developer operations that was otherwise a dozen clicks through the AWS console. Using [boto3] and some simple python I gave that team the start of some real velocity gains. Eventually that grew into a larger kubernetes-based service where the data science operations: code quality, deployment, updates, webapps, etc. were all handled by our platform. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t self-contained, it was a set of things kind of glued together with systems and scripts, but it worked, it works today and is under fantastic ownership.
What I learned just from starting that cli was to be passionate about solving problems. No one asked me to make it, but it needed made, and the team is in such a better place for me having started it.
Kedro and OpenShift #
Another short project I was able to participate in a few years ago was leading a data-syncronization task into a fiery horrific crash that lasted weeks - neigh months longer - than was necessary or appropriate… The details aren’t relevant - I was the lead dev in a new place tasks with syncing up data between 2 applications. Ultimately, could’ve been a python script but I over-designed a kedro-based solution because of some requirements I misunderstood. Part of that misunderstanding was not knowing how to get the requirements I needed, but they weren’t provided in full, I didn’t know any better, so for weeks we were a corporate meme trying to use python to update a database that no one on our team understood if we were allowed to write to…. It was very confusing.
But what I learned was a lot about gathering requirements, questioning assumptions, and the importance of understanding your constraints as fully as possible as early as possible.
A Real Platform #
Then one of the biggest blessings I see for Forge, is the experience I’ve gotten recently with AWS at scale… Not 1 or 2 services created with Medium.com copy pasta tutorials from docs… but experience working in a large project across many accounts, supporting several teams, using a wide variety of technologies from Terraform to Kubernetes.
On this project I learned about practical system design and gained a lot of confidence in supporting systems that are complicated… I’m not the smartest guy in the world but I’m no dummy, and even while lacking fluency in the system I was supporting on this project I learned a lot of troubleshooting skills and gained confidence in my ability to troubleshoot complex systems.
I’ll need this for Forge - which will break certainly, but I’ll be there to fix it and I’m sure I can because I’ve done these other things.
Fin #
The Lord has been with me through these projects - he has certainly blessed me with a skillset and personality that lends itself to being really useful in the Tech world I’ve landed in (which is a whole ’nother story of God’s sovereignty and provision). I am very grateful for the swath of experience I’ve gotten over the last 8 years or so, and this season I’m in of change is rocking me a little more than I anticipated but by God’s grace I think I see the purpose, or at least a purpose, and I pray I am making the choices for work he wants me to make.