So this week, and after around 25 years I finally leave the company I have spent half my life with.. That’s quite an odd thing.
After a few other jobs in my early 20’s I started contracting in Martlesham, interviewed for a Novell job, actually got given a job to run the DNS for the .co.uk for the company. I was in a small team working in “Comnet” who looked after mail, news, dns and I was the “DNS master”.
On my first day, I was presented with a Sun Workstation, and didn’t even know how to get into it (I think it was press the STOP key and A) – I had a small amount of Unix knowledge, AIX I think, so this was a new world. It was now I was introduced to the wonders of O’Reilly books – something that helped my career very often!
I moved from that job after about a year, and got a new contract in Cardiff – not realising until my first day at work, it was actually with the same company! It was simpler times back then..
This is where I first got involved in system/operational management of computer systems, and spend many years in this little team, learning about SNMP and MIBs and alerts and “chocolate” Netview.
The big project was called Cambridge, based in Cambridge unsurprisingly – and we spend many weeks up there, sorting out the system, which had a requirement for “5 nines availability” which was amazing – 99.999% uptime means the system can only be unavailable for about 5 minutes a year! So we deployed multiple redundant systems – all there to check the status of the platform and make sure things were running okay.
I also spent quite a while in Leeds, on the NHS project, which again was deploying monitoring and management and implementing Omnibus across the contract for the Ops teams. Those were happy days, hard days – but also “hard” nights – what a time that was.
There were many other projects including Genie, which was the first mobile internet solution, where internet solution was a few lines of text on a phone – how things have changed today. We often thought about where things would lead, and imagined the amazing possibility of a phone, that could direct you to your destination and show you the best curry houses or pubs once you got there – and then after a few years it actually happened!
After some time I went permie (in 2005) and took over the Asset management and Discovery function, scanning networks and hosts to build up an holistic view of the estate, with “real time” information, this is where I had the pleasure of taking on a few grads into the team – and didn’t they do well….
Unfortunately this area was taken over by a specific regime, which was foreshadowing what was to become a prominent feature in the final 10 years of my career, and they were not interested, didn’t want to fund it, and we were all hung out to dry.
Luckily I had an escape route via my new big boss, who I was delighted to have remained working with for the final 6 years, and I moved into, albeit temporarily at first, big data….
We ran an internal big data platform, processing event information for the analysts, when I say big data, even now it’s quite big, petabytes of storage, and processing three million events per second through the platform. After a few different roles here, design, project management I fell into what one would now call the DevOps area, and built a team of infrastructure and application experts along side traditional Ops guys. In reality, when I looked back, we almost ran a Site Reliability Engineering team, although I that point I had never heard of the phrase….
We had some good years there, working with some great, talented people – but unfortunately the regime took over again, and the same old story happened with funding and management support and a good chunk of the team left to move elsewhere in the company.
The new role had a lot of exciting prospects, and although it was quite a wrench to leave the old project which we had matured into a decent system, I was happy for the change.. We were all to work on an exciting new project, and we embraced the lack of knowledge and got to work building infrastructure in the “cloud”.
This was new to us, we had looked at moving our old project to GCP, but that was mostly a paper exercise, this was actually building stuff for real. All the team learnt a tremendous amount during the last eight months – but for me it was just lacking something.
The company was continuing to shift, something I had seen probably 4 or 5 times over the last 25 years – “new” ideas, “new” leadership, same, if not worse issues – I wanted to find a job which gave me more control, something “smaller” that would allow our ideas to become real, and not have to fight everyday against the big corporate engine, with it’s stovepipe thinking and ingrained “solutions”.
..and I hope I have found it…..
It’s been a tremendous journey, and I have had the pleasure of working on many varied projects, with many varied people, a lot of them brilliant, some of them, well, not so much… But have had a great old time whilst doing it.
I am however, looking forward to the next, and possibly final chapter in my career, a far smaller company, which I am hopeful will be dynamic and technically greedy and open for making things real – quickly and without a ton and a half of red tape and nonsense.
We shall see….