I was writing regularly for a while and then dropped off the radar. The only excuse I have is that by the time I wanted to sit down and write I was dead tired. The new job is a bit draining. There is allot to do and get up to speed on. The past two weeks have been tons of meetings and planning. Two days last week were almost entirely meetings. Yesterday and today was also like that. And if some of our integrators have anything to say about it, tomorrow will also be a minimum of 5-6 hours of meetings. Don’t get me wrong, we are getting allot done. It is just there is tons of other work that can’t get done if I am tied up. That and even though your body is sitting around all day, you get emotionally drained from all that work and discussions.
Work
Day Three
I am on day three at the new job. I am having problems timing my morning schedule right. I am ending up at work very early (aka 8:30AM). That would be ok if I wasn’t staying till 6pm the past two days in a row. Well to be technical yesterday was 6:30ish. I had less meetings today, but I had to work on the list of tasks that I need to tackle. For the record it is hovering around 75 so far. The overwhelming factor is diminished a bit today, so there is hope for me!
Day One
So I started a new job today! Wow, it is totally different, and things are the same all at the same time. I don’t remember starting at my last job being so much of a radical change. I think the department was more established so that might explain it. I am shifting gears to a much smaller organization with more responsibility, vs a very large organization with a set area of responsibility. It is a big adjustment. I am currently in denial mode:) There is just allot to take in. Over time things will come together but the flood of information is allot to get used to.
On the plus side everyone seems really friendly. I can’t complain about the commute. Overall I am just tired from the grind of the first day at a new job. I know it will get easier over time, but it takes a bit to get used to.
2 Weeks Notice
It has been only 14 months since I started, but today I gave my two weeks notice at my current job. In many ways it was a hard decision, but in many others it was an easy one. You may or may not have noticed I have not talked about work on this blog for some time. Part of that was due to my schedule, and another reason was my employer frowned upon it. But I also didn’t have anything interesting to write about. For that reason and a few others I decided to take a new opportunity that came up. The last company I left 14 months ago I was simply burnt out and frustrated. This move is less emotional.
If I had to boil down the reasons why I decided to look to leave I would say it was because this position never transformed into the job that I signed on for in the first place. For that I am disappointed. I like the majority of the people I work with. I think the direction the department is trying to go in is a good one, but I am simply bored and not doing what I enjoy. When you wake up and don’t want to goto work, it isn’t a good sign. I will probably talk more about this decision in the coming weeks, but I wanted to write something today. I will also try to write about some of my experiences that I went through once I am gone. I also hope to be able to discuss more of what I am going to be doing at this new organization, but I can’t be sure.
I am really excited about my new position. It is a smaller organization but the opportunity is huge for me, so I can’t wait to get into the thick of it!
My Presentation
We had our annual division town hall meeting last Friday. It is where the entire division gets together to talk about what we did and where we are going. It is kind of boring, but very informative at the same time. On Monday I ended up volunteering to present my departments slides for the presentation. The other manager who did the slides ended up scheduling a day off on the day of the presentation and they needed someone at the last minute, so I volunteered. I know why would I volunteer? I don’t know. I figured the other manager in my department isn’t a native english speaker, and if I didn’t volunteer he would get stuck with it or my boss would have to do it. I figured not a big deal i’ll do it. Sorry dad, I know you always said never volunteer for anything unless there is more money in it for me! I am a disappointment!
As it turns out the preparation for the presentation (an hour plus long meeting) was worse than the actual presentation. I did my slides perfectly or so I think. I only started fumbling on my words when I tried to ad lib my summary. Oh well. It was a long afternoon but at least I got out of work at 4PM and headed over to the House of Brews to celebrate John’s birthday.
The Busiest Day of The Year
Today was the busiest day of the year for me at work. As it turns out this statement is true on several levels. My current company has a bi-annual event that generates the highest volume of web traffic on one of our sites. We literally began planning for today back in June during our last event. Because of the work shifts we ended up doing, and problems creeping up throughout the day today was also probably the hardest work day I have had since I started working at this job last February.
The odd thing is I kind of liked it regardless of the craziness. There is something about being in the thick of issues with the pressure mounting and you having to make split second decisions that has an odd attraction. I guess I am still sometimes an adrenaline junkie from my days volunteering as an EMT in College. The other alluring aspect of today is you see six months of work put to good use (hopefully), and for me all my skills as an engineer and a manager put to the test. The result is exhausting physical and emotionally, but in the end very rewarding. During our last event in June I commented afterward that if you are in an operations group and you don’t secretly enjoy such days you are in the wrong profession or lying to yourself. I still think that to be true.
The day did have its high and low points. In the end I know now that I have to handle a few personnel issues, and our systems performed better than anticipated. All in all a mixed ending for a roller coaster ride of a day.
Busy Day
Today was one of the two busiest days of the year for the company i work for. That ment i had to be up at work really early last night and work through the night. I got to the office at 9PM or so and worked to 10AM. It was very hectic because we had allot of executives watching everything as well as a few “minor” issues that kept people busy. Over all it was an interesting night and even with our issues it was apparently a successful day.
Last night i went and signed the lease to my new apartment so i am finally squared away with my living situation.
Technorati Tags: Apartment Hunting, Moving
Recruiting
Over the past several weeks i have been interviewing people like crazy for open positions we have on my team. We have been a bit under staffed for a while. We had 2 people leave plus we added new positions so it since a little after i started it seemed like we were under staffed, because we were. Within the past week we have had 2 new people start. I am hoping another person will take an offer and we will be close to full strength. It is good to be able to move multiple projects along when you have the manpower to do it.
Things are starting to shape up at the new place and I am starting to feel more at home. It is a nice feeling. I just don’t want to jinx myself by saying it.
Looking Forward
I wanted to write a bit about some of the cool new projects i am working on at my new job. I am not going to go into great detail but it is something.
One of the biggest things i am doing is working on a plan to move an existing self hosted data center to a Co-Location facility. We just need more space. Thankfully instead of physically moving all of our gear we are looking at getting an all new setup built out and retire most of the old gear. The timing works out perfectly for us so we are giving it a try. We will be moving some stuff, but not a whole lot. Another thing we are trying to do is make this data center site the model (for us at least) for Virtualization. We are going to build out as much if not everything with the exception of SQL server as Virtual Machines running on VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure 3. If all goes according to plan it will be really cool setup. The TCO will also be allot less than doing it physically, it will be quicker to build out and deploy, and it will consume allot less power! The way i think about it is if we get a request for new servers to be build we just see how much Virtual capacity we have and just provision a new machine. If we don’t have extra space, we just purchase an additional node and more SAN storage and add to our VI3 cluster. The goal is to stay far enough ahead in available capacity (minus the N+1 for redundancy) that we always can accommodate even the largest provisioning requests. I can’t wait to see how this turns out! It will be interesting.
Technorati Tags: virtual infrastructure, virtual machines, vmware, VMware ESX Server
Nagios
Rob has gotten allot done with Nagios. Hopefully by the end of the week he should have basic system monitoring (up and down) plus disk space checking on all gear at our data center. Once that is done we can roll out more locations as well as add functionality. He is doing great with it so far. I know Danny wanted to work on the project but he is busy with other issues. I also know Danny would have done a great job on the project, but when he works on stuff like this it seems like it takes him forever to complete stuff. Rob is able to churn out product allot faster. For a time sensitive project like this I am happy with the quick response.
Hopefully this program works out better than our old whatsup system. I can’t wait till the end of the week.
Technorati Tags: nagios, network monitoring, snmp