I'd elected not to go or do anything about IWD this year. Shadows of cynicism, hopelessness, pointlessness, and pragmatically choosing that there were other things I would rather do, but, best of luck to them.
So it was strange that near the end of a crazy, busy day I found myself thankful that I had stayed in engineering.
I laugh at myself. This is me. Internally I barely refer to myself as an engineer. It is not in my list of statements about my identity. I might say 'I did an engineering degree' (and that I am still amazed I actually did) but I don't say 'I am an engineer'.
Today at around 2.30 a newly minted Director, one of the good guys who has brought in the healing wind of change of good people leadership wandered past with purple UN ribbons saying our corporate had bought them for us. So my colleague and I put them on and continued racing through what we were doing respectively.
It was one of those days when I had been meaning to get sunshine and sandwich for the last hour and it was now 3.15 and I had another meeting in 15 mins. And even further subconscious prompting reminded me I had been meaning to go to the bathroom for the last hour.
So because it's a yearly marker I ended up thinking again through now, verses then.
My day had been filled until that point with work of such breadth and depth.
A meeting for collection of requirements for a business/legal/regulatory solution where an architecture solution needed to be chosen and even the existing solution optimised with an end architecture goal in mind and incoming products attempting to interpret incoming legislation in awkward ways. No architect available but conveniently located two desks over and easy reach coffee breaks is the architect who worked on this last year. Good thing as I stare bemused at a precipice of learning about general ledgers and revenue tracking.
In the late afternoon this colleague comments on a solution brief she has architect-ed for zero rating of Paypal portals for those with no credit - this is a customer solution I have been chasing for over four years now. Fascinated and delighted the end is in sight I check it's ok then forward this to the person managing the customer relationship of a high visibility customer who we both have been tracking for two years.
An urgent request had come in for a kind of mobile VPN for which I had recently inherited a hideous email driven process and am trying to sanitise and optimise this immediately with a JIRA instance while 6 and counting different project groups attempt to automate in the same space. And later in the day I find out that one of the implementation teams are setting up their own JIRA such that with their efforts and several other groups most likely it will not just be a notification tool but will at least be able to set states. Oh and I need to teach myself JIRA development ASAP.
A project for a product worked on last year I set a time frame. This time I'm the analyst and not architect and have confidence that I can produce the needed artefacts. And this time I've worked out I need a senior analyst to mentor me and have set this up for tomorrow. And by the end of the day I will meet with them and chunk out time for workshops and have directions and goals and clarity on what I'm actually meant to do in this role.
And I started the day completing an authentication file for a series of SIMs using an Air Gap laptop and PGP encryption while working in this space between machines. And ended the day justifying the ordering of services for creation of SIM candidate cards.
It's been a huge day of interesting and fun tech.
I can do this. It's fun. And I'm glad I stayed.
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