I’ve been sitting on this one for a little while but today’s tweet was a little preview.
A few months ago I took on some “other duties as assigned.” I can’t reveal exactly what those are suffice to say they revolve around software platform management and some additional technical skills that…I didn’t (still don’t really) possess.
At the onset – I was SUPER nervous.
The multiple application platforms I architect, run, and manage – are all mission critical. So – what’s one more right? Well, the new one is 😒 MORE high profile. Great. Also – no one knew anything about it. No back-up, no one to teach or mentor.
So while things started out maybe not the best – I changed my approach very quickly; I reframed the platform as “just another app” that was in need of my monitoring expertise. Not in the sense that it didn’t warrant the criticality it actually possessed but in the end – all most applications are made of the same stuff:
- It lives on an OS
- Talks on the Network
- It’s probably got services
- Those services have processes
- If someone saves something in them they’ve probably got a database
- If someone’s using it – you’ve got users with usernames and passwords
Yeah – there are some finer points; architecture models, languages, maybe Perfcounters to take into account – plenty more too, but on the surface – starting from nothing – that put me way ahead.
This really helped me mentally manage and put some fences around what I was dealing with regarding the nature of the platform’s architecture and started to assuage some key stakeholders’ concerns with speed. It further assisted getting somethings under control pretty quickly.
The state of everything else and the data, well that’s a story for another day.
To be continued…
jeremyxmentzell 