Starting with my new team next week. I'm really looking forward to
the change. My current team focuses on the systems; mainly keeping
them running. The team tried to pivot in the last year in to a
provider of "service APIs" which is an admirable goal but one which
has not really come to fruition, mainly because there's so much
technical debt with the existing systems that we can't get our heads
above water long enough to make any meaningful progress.
The new team focuses mainly on internal tools. I'll be focusing more
of my time on writing code; creating tools to improve productivity
of our internal engineering teams. My hope is to bring my experience
with my current team over with me and provide insights in to how we
can make a meaningful impact on the toil work that these other
frontline teams have to deal with. Until recently, the new team's
focus has mainly been on supporting developers but I'll be working
primarily on supporting our operations teams. Hopefully I'll be able
to make a dent in the main time sinks for these other teams,
allowing them to spend more time with their heads above water.
This whole things started when I introduced Terraform to the company
about 8 months ago. The company started using a cloud provider and
our internal provisioning system, being designed only for deploying
and managing systems in our datacenter, was not up to the task. I
took the opportunity to "ask forgiveness" and make a thing. Well,
they liked the thing and I've been pretty much focused 100% on
writing terraform modules and other sorts of meta automation around
cloud provisioning and infrastruction management.
