Infrastructure for side projects

Today’s cloud landscape has no shortage of options when it comes to deploying HTTP-based applications. For small ideas and side projects I still have a hard time justifying running an entire container cluster, so I find myself reaching for options like Google Cloud Run or AWS Fargate because it provides me with a  clear path towards something like Knative if my small idea starts to grow into something more substantial. At some point if you have enough of these small workloads running it will start to create cost drivers toward building a cluster multiple workloads could share.

The minimum footprint for a side project is a small amount of CI/CD configuration in Gitlab, GitHub, Google Cloud Build or AWS CodeBuild, a deployment target (or several if you run a proper multi stage deployment process including dev, staging, and production). This makes it quick and inexpensive to get things up and running quickly so you can iterate on your idea. 

My toolchain of choice continues to change often because the technology landscape around PaaS and Serverless deployment options is evolving rapidly. AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and similar offerings do not feel like the right fit and the tradeoff between ease of use and vendor gravity doesn’t seem worth it to me at this moment. I have built many solutions using these services and for many use cases they are a better fit than something container based, but I have committed technology sins by using serverless functions in places I should not have. That scar tissue is still fresh.

Forks in the road

Tonight I found out that another co-worker is taking the next step in their career and leaving our company. Selfishly I’m sad I won’t be working with them anymore, but honestly I’m happy for them and know they have a very bright future ahead.

What really got me thinking was the conversation we had after covered the basics (e.g. sorry to see you go, where are you heading, etc.). The reality is that most careers don’t follow the clean-cut path they have in the past. Not very long ago it was common to work for the same company for decades, leave with a gold watch, benefits and a pension. That definitely isn’t the reality I live in, and I often think about the going on five years I’ve invested in my current organization. Granted my career path has been pretty interesting over those years – but I’ve been at the same place.

Today you are responsible more than ever before for your own retirement, your own career and your success. My friend made the comment that loyalty doesn’t exist anymore, I responded that I don’t think it is gone but I think it has changed. Today’s loyalty is a bond between humans, not between a human and an organization. I think I like it that way

When giving me advice at one point a few months ago a senior executive whom I’ve grown to trust said to me that the only way to build the kind of bond he and I were talking about at the time, where near frictionless disagreement and collaboration are possible, was to go through “battle” with someone. He didn’t mean this strictly in the military sense however I can only imagine the result is even stronger in that case. He was referring to the absolute certainty to the guy standing next to you will still be there, fighting right along with you, even when things get ugly. In some jobs, that might be an everyday event or an extraordinary circumstance. Either way the result is the same, you learn who you can trust. You learn who you can count on and you learn whom you can’t.

I’ve lost another one of the people who fit solidly in former category. The good news for me is that you never really lose those people; you just might not know how or when your paths will cross again. In fact, I got a call from another one of the people I’d put in that category earlier today asking me to speak at a User Group his organization is hosting next month.

360 Feedback

One of the Operations Directors at work developed an application we have started to use to gather 360 feedback from the other people in the organization you interact with frequently. This tool basically asks for a number of objective criteria to be evaluated on a 1 to 10 scale and then provides the ability to give you some structured (but largely free form) data on things you are doing well and things you should consider changing.

I like this application and the idea behind it. When it is presented to you (and your manager) it shows you all the feedback but keeps the people providing it anonymous. I will say that I wish there was a way for me to ask questions (anonymously would be fine) about some of the feedback so I can really understand of it but most of it is pretty interesting.

One of the outputs it gives you is the graphic I'm showing here, it maps your certain traits based on the objective feedback. The other most interesting part is looking at the delta between your average rating from peers and how you rate yourself.