September 20th, 2016:
Welcome to Amazon AWS. Well if you are reading this now, you are successfully
experiencing the latest and greatest iteration of my domain www.ki5dr.com
through hosting on Amazon's infrastructure. What you probably DIDN'T know
was that it *WAS working, then I tried to upgrade it, which broke it, then
I FIXED it. Then, while I was working on another domain - www.twilightequilibrium.com,
I broke MINE again... Something about best-practices, and I didn't do mine
quite right, so I thought I would update / correct the S3 bucket naming
convention so that it was NAMED correctly - Um, which broke it.
Rather than open a support ticket with Amazon's Tech team, I figured (Since
I just finished the AWS SYSOPS bootcamp) that I OUGHT to be able to correctly
diagnose and correct the problem myself. Sure enough, I found the problem
stuffed inside the permissions, and how I am utilizing GoDaddy's HTTP-Redirect
rules to send my DNS-naming to the S3 bucket (scratch-that) CloudFront
Caching, which re-points back to my S3 bucket, along with the associated
permissions tools to allow CF <READ> permissions but not write/upload
permissions to my website. BAM! Corrected.
The fact is, I think this is FUN, and would love to do this all day. What's
the rule - Do what you Love? I would enjoy showing this / teaching this
technology to others, and explaining how it works in a meaningful way.
One more fun tidbit - I added an
error page.. try it out!
Outside of that, the job hunt continues....
September 5, 2016:
So, it's officially been 30 days since I was let go from my previous company
- Milestone. As it turned out, our sales team was unable to renew our contract
with eBay going back to January, and although they were in contract negotiations
for several months, they neglected to inform myself or my team that any
of this was going on. We only found out when the NEW company who won eBay's
support contract (GenTec) began calling my engineer's cell phones off-hours
and offering them a position with the new company, as we would no longer
be providing support.
As you can imagine, this caused quite a confusion amongst the team. WHAT?
We are losing our jobs? We have no contract? Who is this new company? Of
course, what we did NOT have were answers to these questions, and so several
of my team members (who feared for their families and well-being) TOOK
those offers and resigned, left, going to work for this new group. It was
a mess.
By the end of July, part of my team was gone, I was not allowed to recruit
/ backfill, and I had some real-concerns for the remainder of my team -
what would happen to them? Ultimately I was able to help facilitate positions
for 10 out of the 14 engineers. By August 5th, however, my position was
eliminated. Now I am out looking for work.
It is interesting to note that, while I have done quite a variety of different
roles over the last 3 years, this seems to have placed me at a disadvantage.
Recruiters tend to be lookng for ONE skillset, and consistency in that
skillset. Gone are those days where variety and breadth of knowledge are
beneficial in the workforce.
This is sad because the landscape today is so much more volatile. Business
moves fast, changes fast, is fairly unstable in the sense that - as a Manager,
I can get into a groove doing my daily grind, only to discover that the
rest of the industry took a sharp left 6 weeks ago, and now we're doing
it all wrong.
We need flexibility - we need the ability to make minor course corrections,
but have checks and balances to continually verify we're doing it right.
As a team, we must all stay current on technology, today's trends. There
is almost always something we are doing that takes time and effort, where
someone, somewhere has figured out how to do it better, more efficiently.
Continued improvement.