As you can tell from the title I had a rather shitty week. Monday night members of our team became concerned that there may be an issue with one our mission critical systems. I immediately took action and began checking for issues with servers and software related to this system. I ran down my list… Servers are all up.. Check! CPU utilization is in acceptable ranges… Check! Web process are operational… Check! Load balancer is operational… Check! This issue was a head scratcher. The following morning I added extra logging to our processes hopefully this would provide some insight. Well it did I just didn’t realize how to interpret the data we were receiving to pinpoint the issue. Long story short I was on a call with two team members and I said “I have no idea what the issue is. Maybe I need to just restart the servers.” As I was about to do that I connected to the server and by pure accident opened a screen and found the issue. A server process had had silently failed and we didn’t notice. I turned the process back on and our issue disappeard.
This was just the start of the week and it didn’t get too much better. We had other services that decided to flake out on us all week until we found those issues and resolved them. Funny thing I was really looking forward to getting some code written. We did have some successes delivering some new features but overall I was just happy that this week was just about over. Then today happened…
This morning helped turn what was a shitty week into one that ended on a positive note. Let me tell you why… A few years back I started attending a monthly group called Creative Mornings Austin. Every month a lot of the “creative types” in Austin get together to meet other “creatives”, listen to music and hear an inspirational speaker. I really love attending these monthly talks and find that they help me recharge and rebalance. Well attending today was more important that I ever figured it would be AND I nearly didn’t go. I nearly bailed out at the last minute as my wife may have needed the car and it would be difficult to coordinate. Well Jess was awesome as usual and sensed that I needed this so we figured it out. I would drop her off, go to CM and pick her up on the way home, provided she could get off work early. Coolness I could attend!
After dropping her off around 6:00am I found a coffee shop and worked until the CM meeting started at at 8:00am. When I got to CM I soon realized that this month was the December meeting and THIS IS MY FAVORITE meeting every year. You see December is the month when we get to create our own ornaments. One of the members of our group creates laser cut wood ornaments which we get to decorate. Check out mine…
Nothing too fancy from me but it did bring me a certain amount of peace. Then we moved on to the music part of the meeting. I really enjoy this as the types of musicians the organizers find are generally not part of my musical rotation of heavy metal and hard rock LOL. I closed my eyes and let the lovely music from artist named Lisa Marshall wash over me. More peace entered my worn down psyche. Then we moved onto our main speaker. Jodie King. Jodie is a local artist and spoke of her transition from business person to full time artist. It was THIS talk that confirmed that I really NEEDED to go to CM today. There was one statement that stuck out: “Thoughts turn to things” meaning if you think negatively you will get a negative outcome, yet if you think positively, you will get a positive outcome. She added an additional message the XX which to Jodie means cancel, cancel. When negative ideas creep in CANCEL CANCEL and and turn the thoughts positive.
So lets just CANCEL CANCEL the early part of the week and end on a positive note!