The 11th Hour

I’m just fresh from a production deployment on the 11th hour before our change freeze. It literally on the 11th hour. We did our deployment an hour before the change freeze. The project was hit by a series of bad luck. We had the usual unstable requirements, some implementation changes(perl to groovy), applying tickets late in the project life cycle and a bunch of misspellings in the deployment directory. Some could have been averted(late application of tickets), some risks could have been minimized(requirements) but some are just simply bad luck(misspelling of the deployment directory).

It was stressful, but it was fun in a certain way. I was laughing the whole time because of the bad luck that came with the project. If we don’t have those ridiculous amount of bad luck this project would only be stressful. Those “I can’t believe this is happening” moments are the bright spots in this project.

Its a year’s worth of negative karma. I hope I burned them all this year.

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It’s hard to lead people when their livelihood does not depend on obeying you. And if your team has a lot of people having strong personalities, its a very rough terrain to tread. I learned these things when I led our team for the Christmas decoration contest. You have those people who have strong personalities, those who can’t help that much because of valid reasons(family) and those who doesn’t want to help at all.

Sometimes in a group project you really don’t expect some people to be of any help. Some really does not have the talent to do what needs to be done. But at least help in those things that you can do. Even I was not much of help on our Christmas origami project(I’m bad at folding papers). Aside from leading the team all I did was buy the materials and help in setting-up the decors.

We won third place.

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My laptop’s case has cracks. I have brought this to the service center twice because of the cracks near the hinges. But this is out of warranty now. Maybe its time to buy a macbook next year(if don’t see a silver 31mm lens).

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Just had my year end review last week. I don’t care much about it. As long as I don’t get kicked out of the job its ok. I don’t care about career that much. But I do want to achieve something next year. I guess I really need to get a bit serious next year.