Foregerock Mess

I got dragged into a project that affected the apps in our domain. Company-wide move from one system to another is causing disruptions in a few systems. A fix was rushed last week but this did not seem to have fixed the issue. The workaround was to do a partial roll back by poting back to the old system so these apps can continue to work until a permanent fix is found.

This company-wide change and its impact on operations pulled a key resource from my project, a young Indian programmer - Arun - who is here for a few months. He hails from Bangalore India though he is initially from Hyderabad - a place known for its biryani. I had lunch with him and a young trainee in a restaurant in Woodruff known for its biryani. I miss this kind of lunch outing with young people for easy and spontaneous conversations.

Arun is also a key contributor to the French project which has been a challenge mainly because of the young team from India which takes more time to learn and ramp up. Sometimes it takes a long meeting to get things moving. A young graduate from Pune is learning the new system and I got resources to help mentor her on the tool she is using. She is keen to learn despite the challenges she faces and also the treatment of older Indian colleagues who denigrate her because she is female. Nevertheless, she has proven herself to be resilient with a good spunky attitude.

Next week the business project leader from France will be here for 4 days for onsite meetings. She is the second person from France who is coming locally to 'help' the local team in the project. I encouraged this type of interaction to get the French people to commit to themselves; to get skin in the game to ward our success locally; instead, of snipping from afar whenever our tasks are delayed. Nevertheless, it is always good to get people from France for socialising and team building.

Regulated Stress

I attended a retirement party at the office this afternoon. My colleaugue worked for 32 years with the company. I worked with her a few times; she has a irreverent quality that comes from someone who lived in California and experienced travel to Canada and France for work. She is a competent and knoledgebale person who people enjoyed working with due to her no nonsense approach.

I worked with the company for 27 years so far and the people I talked with during the event had 34 or 32 years of service though they were some who had less. I recall jokes that retirees often wondered what happened to their life as time went by quickly without their realizing it. But noone regretted spending more time in the office. I remeber a former coleague who retired several years ago who often invited me to fish but I refused as I feared being away from the office that I might missed doing an important task.

The fear of being fired was foremost in my mind; being afraid of what other people might think if I did not measure up. What an idiotic though I realize now. I have been going to therapy for some time now and these sessions helped me become aware of my incorrect thinking ways; causing me stress and anxiety when it was not really called for. We had nice cup cakes and the conversation was good; with each of us talking about retirement and counting the days or years left.

Early in the day, I had an early meeting to talk about the work units or user stories that our team needed to work on in our coming sprint. Now that the company is organized into Agile teams, which is the new way of working on projects where office work is broken into small segments of units that are completed during a 3 to 4 week sprint. Recently, I have been made squad leader who is responsible for Agile squad in our domain.

I am transitioning into this role which require a lot of planning, meetings and other 'executive' type of work which is different from my usual problem solving mode, to get rid of fires;  seat of the pants type of challenge. One has to step back and look at the long view and think about each individual as well as the overall welfare of the squad; to keep the unit up and running for each sprint. A much different way as compared to the work done in the past several years.