we had a lot of date specific background tasks that run. one day one of the major tasks were not doing anything at all. check the builds in jenkins, was being triggered at 8pm as designed , but no output or errors, just success. eventually found out that someone changed the timezone on the remote host executing the job, so the job was infact running in the future where no events existed! needless to say was a simple fix! and mow I use NTP for everything

The most annoying co-worker(*team*) I have worked with just signed off a custom project that uses plain text passwords, hard coded into a file.. PLAIN TEXT!!! NO HASH!!! NOTHING!!! The same team also told me that working in feature branches cuts into their productivity, but they want CI/CD implemented NOW!

sys.exit (0)

my reason being... i resigned! and starting a new exciting journey in DevOps for a Start Up

this is not a rant.. more like the opposite of rant.. I want to share my overwhelming joy.. that is.. finally receiving my preview for AWS EFS!!!!! I must have applied for this about 8 times! And only today, do I get my prayers answered! Today is going to be a good day! :D

I was one of the early adapters to devrant. And I qualified for my free stickers ages ago. But thanks to the useless South African postal service, I still havent received my stickers over a month down the line :( I have so much sadness in me because I NEED these stickers!

502 bad gateway on AWS!! OMFG!!! So I cant deploy to my newly created VPC of awesomeness!

The coolest project I was ever involved on, was when we signed a client in Namibia (we were a South African based company). So I was flown to Namibia for 2 weeks to train the clients etc. I spent about 4 days training the client and I had no more work to do. So the client took me out around town and we drank so much on his tab! He even gave me a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue, because he doesnt drink Whiskey! The best part of it, apart from exploring their awesome country and pubs, was Mad Max 4 was being filmed in my town, and my client took me to see the yard where all the vehicles and props were situated, because he owned that property! So all in all, it was more of a paid holiday than anything else!

Finally have my DCOS cluster running! On paper this should be amazing. But I have now figured out that the front end Devs have about 400 uncommitted HTML templates, which means I cannot proceed with out severe chaos! I spend so much time creating an awesome data centre, only to be thwarted by other peoples laziness!

So Im trying out DCOS. Thats a REALLY huge bash script :P

So I've been getting a lot of attention from various companies ranging from small tech start ups, to big established companies. I've had a lot of interviews that all went really well! So some weeks passed, and I have no feed back from any companies, so I proceed. I eventually get an offer from one company that is really good. They day i accepted it, I received about 4 other offers from all the other companies! And I got about 5 interviews to now decline! Murphy's law at is cruellest!

So I applied for a Cloud Architect position. The process was very intensive. Roughly 6 interviews, 2 practical assignments and a written exam. In total it took me 3 weeks to go through the screening process. I aced everything, and was told they were going to send me an offer. I received an email on the 21st of April asking me if I was still interested. I replied back immediately saying I was most def interested. The next morning I get an email back from the hiring manager, who happened to CC the client as well, saying I took too long to reply to the offer, and the job was filled. I was perplexed as to how I took too long to reply. I went through the email chain that the client also received, and saw the hiring manager changed the email headers in the reply chain from the 21st of April, to the 12th of April. So it made out that I did indeed take too long and the client went with someone else! WTF! Very unprofessional, but very little I could do.. I wasted a lot of time and energy and heartache with this!

Crazy deadlines> Director: "You need to design a new architecture that has failover, multi-AZ, automated deployments, CI/CD pipeline, automated builds/tests as well, for our new SaaS product. You have 3 days to complete it"

Me: "Ok cool. Do we have the new product developed? Can I have the spec docs of the new software, libs and packages required for the env?"

Product Lead: "No we dont have anything yet. The POC is on my local PC, but I dont know what packages are needed to run it"

Me: "So I cant design anything unless I have the minimum requirements to run the new software"

Director: "Just get it up and running in a live environment and we'll take it from there"

Me: *sigh*..this is going to be a big mistake

so I had a very important video conference for some rather large cloud infrastructure that Im engineering. I decide to look "smart" so i decided to wear a jersey during the video call. I aced the meeting, happy people all round. I walk to my room and my wife says "you do know your jersey is inside out...and back to front..and the label is sticking out from under your chin....How did the meeting go?" me:"..fine until you pointed out a look like a 2 year old dressed me !" ... well thats one way to kill the happy feels!

So 90% of the Tech Support team is off today. So I decided to jump in to help the guys out:

Me: *solves issue
(one less ticket to solve)
Reporter: "thank you for your help!"
(re-opens the ticket)
Me: *recloses the ticket
Reporter: "thanks again"
(Reopens ticket)
Me: smashes head into desk

How am I supposed to get tickets solved when most of the open tickets are "thank you's"!

this really happened:
Interface Team Lead: "hey I want any time deployments and better QA"

Me: "ok sure. I have CI/CD, but yiu need to work in feature branches / tags, and make sure your code passes automated builds and unit tests"

Team Lead: "I dont have time to test it makes me unproductive! and creating a branch is an extra step which is going to set me back. Im telling the boss you are impacting performance!"

Me: "you want better deployments and QA, but you can even create a branch or tes your work?"

Team Lead: "We have deadlines!"

so a year ago, a client tried to sue our company because he is a dick. we terminated the contracted and went our ways. a year later he wants to come back to us because he thought he could run his real estate business himself using WordPress! I really hate this asshole