#so I truly cannot estimate how long it took considering the gaps between working on it were like weeks at a time | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mikegchambers · 7 years

Text

My personal journey to the cloud from my first job on a trading floor to startups

“Hi, my name is James. I’m a self-confessed cloud-oholic and I’ve been off-premise for 7 years now.”

Please do not share this picture with anyone … it’s was my pre-cloud late 90’s look.

There’s no self-help group for someone like me — technology is in my blood. I owned my first computer when I was 5, and from then onward I collected technology like most kids had stuffed toys.

I started writing for a local computer magazine at 12, then a national UK magazine. When I got to college, I had a regular column on a British platform called Oracle Teletext.

“You’ll never need more than 16KB of RAM.” Let me just type that reminder into my 4GB Pixel….

It would have been easier to do cool kid things and hang out at the mall but spending every waking hour thinking about all the problems that can be fixed with machines kept me too busy.

My first job on a trading floor

After earning a CS degree at college, starting work as a software developer was a jarring experience. Having to work in teams of developers is not something they taught at school, nor did they train anyone on how to make sense of ancient convoluted systems. At school, you start from a blank screen and build something beautiful all by yourself, which very rarely happens at work.

If you show this picture to ANYONE… oh wait, it’s the Internet.

My group built electronic trading software for hedge funds, portfolio managers, and the like. Most trading happens at the open and close like a twice-daily Black Friday that stresses the back-end. Our infrastructure was killing us as the platform grew and the amount of data choked any attempt to solve the problem without taking the system offline.

Best of all, our users were traders — and they were assholes on a good day. Their needs changed constantly and were communicated telepathically. They completely lost it when during an outage and had no tolerance for bad data, missing functions or sloppy UI.

Smart, volatile and demanding users — working for them ended up being the very best training for today’s user base, and it taught me several life lessons:

User don’t know what they want. At least, not the final version of what they want. They can read the road for the next hundred feet but anything beyond the headlights is unknown. The paradox is we can only know what to do build in the short term, yet our scaffolding has to work forever.

Developers underestimate how much effort is involved. The one constant across all developers is a total failure to estimate to how long something will take. 80% completion happens quickly and then the last 20% takes forever, if at all. You pad their estimates, your boss pads your estimates and the delivery is still late.

Stability is everything. Your system should not fail. Do not, under any circumstances, allow it to fail. But if you do fail, every single outage must be investigated and remedied so it never happens again.

On Error Resume Next: Product Management

In the mid-2000s, I moved to the Bay Area and worked in startups for several years as a Technical Product Manager. This was during the phase when everybody who previously had an idea for a website now had ideas for mobile.

In the Bay Area, a Product Manager is a coder who is yelled at by customers and also produces road-maps nobody uses.

As we moved into mobile, our users were regular people with cell phones, and our competitors were either well-funded startups or the established technical luminaries. Our development teams were much smaller, budgets were tighter and yet our epic aspirations didn’t seem to notice we were horribly equipped for success.

Mobile made scaling problems insurmountable for start-ups — buying new servers sucked up budgets, configuring load balancers and database replication wasted development time that should have been spent perfecting the UI. And investors and founders, usually bored with the the grind of their real jobs and attracted to the gold rush, were on a mission to become the next billion dollar app with no revenue and an army of users.

At the time, there was iOS, Android, Windows and BlackBerry, all using different frameworks and languages, and it looked like these could fragment further. We were trying to put together apps that are essentially a dozen screens which could have been built as a .NET desktop app in a day. And yet we did manage to release apps, solve problems and build some businesses.

I learned:

You don’t know enough. Your team’s knowledge has gaps in networking, security, scaling, electrical engineering, machine code, you name it. When you face problems that veer into these areas, it’s like quicksand for your product. Developers like tough problems and have curious minds, so these types of issues are a siren’s call.

Complexity is death to progress. When your team owns all the pieces, they write complex code that locks systems together. But when developers can only use APIs to talk to other systems and don’t know how they are implemented, they write simple code that makes the system modular.

Dreams aren’t code. If you can’t make your idea function in a spreadsheet or a flowchart, it cannot be built in code, no matter how simple the investor or VC says it is.

Understanding the problem domain is key to building good solutions.

Discovering a better way

Sometime around 2010 it became clear to me that as a development group, we could confidently write solid applications running on machines in the same building. But deployment was difficult — and once apps hit production they weren’t performing as well.

We had been using some cloud apps for a while but hadn’t seriously used AWS until it became absolutely necessary. A client app had started to gain momentum and we didn’t have the money to scale up on-premise, so we became AWS users very quickly. It was a fortuitous but mildly alarming moment to realize we didn’t have any alternatives — but it quickly became the de facto way to build our products.

I had some lightbulb moments during this time:

Infrastructure is hell. It brings out the inner tinkerer in everyone, and it’s a distraction that stops you writing code. You also can’t manage it well no matter how hard you try. So don’t.

Dev-staging-prod doesn’t work. It’s not sophisticated enough, doesn’t stop bugs reaching the customer and ultimately just provides an illusion of quality. Every service needs versioning at every stage with incoming traffic routed accordingly.

Agile is beautiful. We were doing it while also doing waterfall because that was considered professional. When I read the Agile Manifesto I almost wept — I knew this was how we would build software from now on.

What happens in Vegas … becomes a career

In 2012 I attended the very first AWS re:Invent conference in Vegas and that changed everything. Witnessing the entire ecosystem around the platform, it was obvious that many people had been grappling with the same issues and there were a slew of great solutions available.

There was a haunting question about why nobody else was offering this — Amazon was the only game in town and either they were incredibly prescient or we were all being gleefully over-optimistic about this whole cloud thing. This lag continued for years — it gave AWS a 6-year lead over its competition which is why its capabilities still smoke the competition.

In our shop we weren’t the first to the cloud by any measure but we embraced it wholeheartedly. Within 6 months there were a number of unexpected side-effects:

We became truly agile. Our users still didn’t know what they wanted and the devs still underestimated the work, but the dynamic in building products had changed. We could spin on a dime and make radical shifts without blowing the house down — or blowing the budget up.

The things we didn’t understand well were understood for us. Cloud took many of the computer sci-ency problems away and solved them. This allowed us to focus on building only the apps and our productivity (and profitability) sky-rocketed.

Our apps became really good. Many weren’t popular and didn’t survive investment rounds but they were extremely stable, scalable and looked like the products of a much bigger team. I cried for the apps that didn’t make it.

My future as a Technical Product Manager in cloud

In using cloud solutions as the backbone to all the products I’ve worked on, I’ve had to step up my technical game constantly. It’s not enough to be a Product Manager with road-maps and wire-frames — I need to know reliable patterns and trusted practices to create the best technical architecture.

This has meant constant training, taking on programming projects and learning new frameworks as the environment changes. It’s also meant making a commitment to conferences and workshops, which has become an automatic line-item in my budget.

On the business side, cloud has given me the confidence to assess viability and likely cost, predict timeframes more reliably and help business partners understand where the business ideas and the technology meet. In many ways, the concepts between agile, cloud and lean are so intertwined that I often think they are different views around the same thing.

Fail fast, waste little, learn constantly and always deliver customer value — cloud is central to making this work.

There are still a few road bumps

There are still plenty of naysayers. I worked for some more traditional companies after the California days and it was like jumping in the DeLorean and setting the clock to ‘Fail’.

They all grappled with an aging, fragile, expensive IT infrastructure that delivered limited business value and had no hope of helping them innovate or differentiate in the future. Those companies are waiting for a generation of executives to retire and competitive threats to reawaken the appetite that once made them giants.

There are also the fakers in the industry, the ones who for years dismissed cloud, laughed at Amazon and claimed it could never work. Now they scramble to promote their own clouds with the same limited tools and restrictive contracts they had on-premise.

The me-too players like Oracle serve to bring the laggards into the cloud ecosystem but they offer nothing fundamental or game-changing to the technology. 5 years ago they said cloud wasn’t secure and now they say only their clouds are safe, so I suppose fear can drive sales in anything.

But I live by mantra “Go where you are celebrated, not tolerated.” I’m not here to convince yesteryear’s IT professionals that our industry’s change is accelerating geometrically. I’m here because I’m committed to using the cloud and its toolbox to build the next generation of software that solves the next round of problems. I want to get to machine learning and AI, and move from onClick to onPrediction — the cloud is where all of this will happen.

So that’s my story. Most of us geeky kids who grew up with computers didn’t become Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos but it’s been an amazing ride. The opportunities are everywhere and the future has never been brighter. My name is James. I’ve been a self-confessed cloud-oholic for the last 7 years. I don’t think that’s ever going to change.

My personal journey to the cloud from my first job on a trading floor to startups was originally published in A Cloud Guru on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

from A Cloud Guru - Medium http://ift.tt/2qBkBh3

#A Cloud Guru - Medium

0 notes

giveuselife-blog · 7 years

Text

Ten Tips for a Glad Life from A Great Mind

New Post has been published on https://giveuselife.org/ten-tips-for-a-glad-life-from-a-great-mind/

Ten Tips for a Glad Life from A Great Mind

What is “Satisfied” and is it honestly attainable? In this age of rapid-paced, information overload, what do we really want from Lifestyles?

I believe we need what people have always wanted. We need to be Glad. We need to love and make a contribution to others. We need to be cherished. We need to assume we are making a distinction, that there’s a “motive” or cause for our existence.

Whilst a few might argue that Happy (as in merrily skipping along thru Existence) is an overused time period and no longer a practical purpose, let’s consider Glad as being peaceful and content material, as being the other of depressing, as being empowered to be all that we can be in Life, a good way to have loving and sustainable relationships. And then, I suppose, every person will agree that that is a state in which we might all want to be concentrated.

Primarily based by myself non-public exploration into this critical quest, I’ve summarized what I view because the Pinnacle Ten Recommendations to a Glad Existence, as taught with the aid of a number of the idea leaders today who are remarkable authors, audio system, and non secular teachers..

Top TEN:

1. Be Present, Be Here Now

Research endorse we have someplace among 12,000 to 65,000 mind per day, although I have visible connection with a much wider range (among 2,000 to six hundred,000!). Most typically, 50-60,000 is considered a terrific estimate.

Being human method being inundated with thoughts all day, each day: limitless observations, decisions, interpretations, lawsuits, issues, ‘what-ifs’, memories, regrets, desires, goals, goals about our destiny, anger about our past, and on and on. I’ve visible statistics indicating ninety five% of them are comparable from everyday. a few mind appear completely random, others can hijack us as we observe a thread and let our feelings react to what are once in a while completely irrational, twisted versions of fact. For me, it’s been a primary leap forward to remember the fact that I am now not my thoughts. For too long, my mind ran me. They nevertheless try and, every unmarried day, however I am watching them now. I used to look to my thoughts for which means, questioning why I was suddenly disillusioned when not anything had befell.

So how a great deal of a median person’s thoughts are rooted in the Gift moment? a few advise that most people of our thoughts are rooted within the past (someplace among 70 and ninety%) with about 10-20% ruminating or dreaming or imagining what will occur inside the destiny. A small percentage of our thoughts definitely awareness on the present second in a only experiential manner. Within our minds, our notion of the beyond, how it’s miles affecting us now and into the future can regularly grow to be warped.

Eckhart Tolle, author of “The Power of Now” and “A brand new Earth” and different books is a speaker and teacher In this area. Tolle tells us: “Live fully Gift inside the now-your entire Life unfolds Right here. within the now there’s pleasure of Being and deep peace”.

In Deepak Chopra’s “Seven spiritual Legal guidelines of Success”, he says that natural potentiality is natural consciousness, the field of all possibilities and infinite creativity. Meditation to hook up with our inner being to be Gift and master our mind can help us to find that country of natural recognition.

2. Your mind Create your reality

Whilst you start to remember the fact that you aren’t your thoughts, that you are a being with a powerful internal spirit that takes place to actually have a mind that does what brains do, non-prevent technology of thoughts, you can step returned and examine this and take manipulate. don’t forget how you could choose how your brain operates just as you’re making these choices approximately the use of your arm or your arms or your eyes each day of your Life.

The belief which you genuinely may want to manage and direct your mind to create anything fact you pick can open up an entire new international. If, for example, you inform your self which you cannot succeed at some thing – then you definately likely may not. So, the obvious query is why inform yourself that? And yet we do it all of the time..

there is a lot groundbreaking paintings In this location over the last decade, the whole thing from the books at the Law of Enchantment (such as the blockbuster work known as “The name of the game”) and new science indicating that mind are without a doubt bits of quantum power (see my publish entitled “The technological know-how in the back of the Mystery”), which opens up even extra incredible implications for our capacity talents if we can master our mind.

Louise Hay (founder of Hay House) is an inspiring instance of this powerful idea in action. Her endless books and CD’s on Affirmations display how you can trade your Existence through the very simple practice of constantly producing fine, Lifestyles-declaring mind. From “Strength mind” by using Louise Hay: “Trust Lifestyles to listen and reply to your wonderful words. Say those affirmations every day and your complete international will exchange for the better.”

3. Be Grateful

Expressing gratitude, especially if you can make it a day by day practice to claim everything you’re Grateful for in your Life, can create effective self-putting forward thoughts in preference to terrible ones and align your attention to the entirety that is right in your Life. This on my own can be transformational. Many contemporary thought leaders and non secular teachers inspire human beings to maintain a gratitude journal.

If you do a seek on Gratitude quotations, you may discover many empowering thoughts. Here’s a few:

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of concept; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by way of marvel.” G.Okay. Chesterton

“God gave you a present of 86,four hundred seconds today. Have you used one to mention ‘thank you?’ ” William A. Ward

“If the best prayer you stated on your whole Life turned into, ‘thank you’, that might suffice.” Meister Eckhart

4. Agree with that the universe is unfolding because it ought to..

Or perhaps an less difficult way to say that is, Have confidence. now and again in our darkest hours, while nothing seems to be going as we had wanted or predicted, we cannot see this. We want handiest to fight in opposition to What’s. the whole thing will not constantly pass our way however, If you Consider Existence and allow it unfold, as Mick Jagger stated, “you just might get what you need”.

For some this may mean a belief in God, aligned with one of the superb religion traditions, for others it’d simply suggest understanding that there may be a more Existence pressure, that we are all a part of it, and that Life will take us where we want to head if we surrender to it.

five. practice Forgiveness

Oprah and others, have defined Forgiveness as recognizing that you can not exchange the beyond. We hold onto a lot of resentment and in the end, who does it harm? We hurt ourselves more than absolutely everyone else. Accepting what has passed off and developing the gap to move on may be a effective step forward.

sometimes, specifically when you have been a sufferer of crime or abuse, whatever took place might also seem ‘unforgiveable’. In these instances, take into account that forgiveness does no longer mean you need to permit that man or woman again into your Existence but it could launch you from the maintain that this has on you.

In different instances, we can also have imagined transgressions that were in fact, minor. Caroline Myss, scientific intuitive and author of some of bestselling books including “Sacred Contracts”, outlines the commonplace archetypes that drive our behaviours. She identifies the “victim” as one of the 4 archetypes for survival that could lead you to trust that “you are constantly taken gain of and it’s by no means your fault.” If this feels familiar, her work may be of hobby.

No matter the state of affairs (and many can also lie in between these extremes), if you have anger or bitterness to your coronary heart, you must do the work wished (whatever that is for you) to let it move. It literally will suck the Life out of you and might have an effect on all of your relationships. The serenity prayer from AA says it all: “God, provide me the serenity to just accept the matters I cannot exchange, Courage to change the things I’m able to, And understanding to understand the difference.”

6. observe your Bliss

Certainly one of Joseph Campbell’s famous quotations…

Many will say that they would like to follow their bliss however they must pay the payments, do not have time, it’s too past due to exchange path, or another variety of excuses.

I might contend that for many of us, we don’t truly know what our ‘bliss’ is. Of route, it seems like it need to be the greener grass on the other side. In reality, the concept of strolling away from a hard job and living in luxury appears glad – however this is not what Campbell supposed.

sometimes we need to take a tough observe our Existence circumstances and make adjustments along our journey. The crucial thing is to be conscious. Make aware picks. Embody work that you love. Don’t forget, even When you’re “following your bliss”, there can be difficult sledding at times. that is Without a doubt no longer a loose price tag to give up.

7. pick your Lifestyles

that is some other attitude on “observe your Bliss”. every so often, it’s now not our outdoor occasions that need to trade however our interior measurement.

I took a path referred to as the Landmark Discussion board a few years ago, and this turned into a key concept after 3 long days of workshop. It correlates back to the idea that ‘your mind create your fact’.

Whilst you claim that your Lifestyles, your partner, your children, your process, your world are all precisely what you continually desired, then they’ll grow to be that for you.

8. do not take yourself too critically

Or, placed another way: “Recover from yourself”.

No one likes complaint and all of us have fragile egos… however once in a while, when our thoughts hijack us, we can flip the only feedback into conspiracy theories.

The fact is that not the entirety is set you, every so often when people scowl at you, it is because they may be sad interior. If someone says something to you that you don’t like, you do not must react in kind. In truth you will be in a position trigger transformation in some other through now not letting your ego take over, as a substitute be Present with that individual and be compassionate.

Deepak Chopra asserts that “… The ego is not who we definitely are. The ego is our social masks, it’s far the role we’re playing.”

If you are conscious and Present with people, no longer coloured via past injustices or imagined indignities, then you can pick to continually have effective, meaningful conversations.

now not being driven by using ego takes consciousness, commitment, and Braveness…

nine. we’re all one

while you are taking steps to be Present, grow to be committed to not ‘be your ego’ or run by your g mind, to be grateful for the people to your Life, and to create your reality then you’ll start to sense more and more which you aren’t alone but part of something a great deal more, the collective spirit of humanity.

Even the ultra-modern clinical breakthroughs with respect to quantum attention and unified subject idea are demonstrating that the universe and the entirety in it, ourselves blanketed, are interconnected by a massive area of strength.

In this collective space, love and contribution turn out to be natural which in flip can gas concord and peace on your Existence.

10. aware Evolution

Last yr, I took the Evolutionary Worldview route through Enlightennext Magazine and Andrew Cohen and later, watched the occasion: “A Name to conscious Evolution, Our moment of Choice” which changed into additionally hosted by this institution. Both experiences have been inspirational and eye-opening. As Deepak, one of the many renowned speakers at the Evolutionary Leaders’ occasion, stated: “… The only way to transform the sector is to convert yourself..” and “… Even properly-meaning activism is frequently coming from an area of concern instead that creative awareness..”

This jives with a few of the teachings of Andrew Cohen and his crew with admire to the evolution of our indoors dimension and our tradition. Our mind, our being, or our “interior measurement” as they Name it have developed just as our bodies have. They communicate approximately four billion years of evolution on this planet and the way we, as sentient, powerful beings, can now pick out wherein we move from Here. They ask questions like: “how does your own evolution come into the subculture, into converting the arena?” and “To what degree are you enabling this manner of evolution through your personal heroic efforts?” in order that we can go away the world a better vicinity because we had been Here.

Making conscious selections regular to feed and workout your body for most effective health and nicely-being is the opposite facet of the coin to choosing the thoughts that you feed yourself for most suitable mental health and properly-being. WILL Energy has an entire new depth of which means…

0 notes