First Post

Hi there! Welcome to my first post.

This is the start of a new adventure in building some stuff and writing about it.

Finding Passion

For the last little while since I have been out of school and have started working in a “real” job, I have been trying to figure out my place in this world of software. I guess in reflection, I’ve been searching for what I am actually passionate about. In school I was incredibly interested in compilers, programming languages, and operating systems. After being in the industry, I am still interested in those topics, but other things have caught my eye. I am now incredibly fascinated with the idea of building highly-scalable, cloud-based software that can be deployed easily and focuses on the customer.

First Team

The first team that I was on in MasterControl was a “feature” team working on the Manufacturing product. We built features for the product in Spring and Angular. It was a great learning experience in MVC web applications and software development process. I had an amazing mentor on the team that really took me under his wing and I felt that I came up to speed really quickly because of this.

After getting the lay of the land and getting a little more comfortable, I started to feel like something was missing. While the team that I worked on was great, the process in my company for integrating code and releasing to customers felt… disconnected.

I started reading articles and books about modern software practices and what we were doing didn’t seem that close to these ideals. While reading the DevOps Handbook, I started feeling the urge to be apart of this “movement”. But when talking to those around me, I started to feel more alone, not many people seemed to care too much about these “ideals”.

Helping On The Pipeline

At the beginning of a PI (my company follows SAFe) last year, my team was asked to help out with the System Team for a couple of sprints. This initiative was to move our existing pull request pipeline that ran on local hardware up to AWS. I was extremely excited, finally I was able to get more hands on experience with something downstream of the features I was building.

The two sprints that we helped out was a whirlwind, but I loved it. It was a rush to move everything up to the new environment because the current pipeline was burning down on slower local hardware. But even though it was hectic, I felt at home solving these problems.

Moving to the System Team

After our short time helping on the pipeline migration we went back to our normal work. After a couple of sprints being back, I started to think about the experience a lot. I really enjoyed the time working on those problems and I got a little bit of a better understanding of how my code moves down the stream.

When I heard that the System Team was looking to grow, I reached out to their manager to talk about it and get more information. At first I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do because I was so new in the industry and wasn’t really sure which direction I wanted to go. Also, I was a little nervous that the new position would require a lot more time commitment than my current position. After some talks with the System Team manager and my wife, I decided to move to the System Team.

That was one of the best decisions I have made.

Being a Pipeline Peep

Being on the System Team (we call ourselves the Pipeline Peeps), has been an amazing journey. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the smartest people I have met, and I’ve been right in the middle of everything in development at MasterControl.

This experience has given me a little more clarity on what I am passionate about in this industry.

Thanks

If you’ve made it through this, I want to thank you. It’s probably not that interesting of stuff to anyone other than me.

But honestly, this blog is kinda mostly for me. I have a desire to build things to mess around with things that interest me. And I want to write about them. If you find any of the things I post interesting, than that’s just a bonus!!