Over the last 7 months our team at my shop continued to support our technology organization. We worked on small, med, and large efforts. This was an adjustment from the previous call of duty our team fulfilled over the last 6-7 years. We dropped back into our developer (think coder) roles for some of the support we provided. At times there were lulls – hours, or a day, where we could dive into something we hadn’t gotten on us before. I, on the other hand, dove back into something I hadn’t gotten on me in about 6-7 years.

Then.

I was always interested in cloud technologies – building against them, integrating with them, and leveraging them to build something as big as a water bottle to something as big as a rocket ship. Previously, the goo, guts, and tools didn’t exist to hammer out a solid end-to-end solution. Well, all that has changed, and even more so now with the need to engage the world without seeing someone face to face.

Now.

Last week I stepped back and thought about how to dip the first toe in this massive technology lake. Then after about the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee, my idea was to just jump in feet first. Why not head first? When you jump from a high place (train trestles during high school in my case), you need to land feet first. It felt like I was jumping from that height, or that far away from the water’s surface.

First it was a brute force effort. Then, I realized I did hit the water feet first, but hadn’t made back to the surface. The way different components communicate with other components in this particular cloud not only were different, they didn’t exist 6-7 years ago. So I was slightly impeded by this abundance of old knowledge that didn’t line up with the stack of knowledge in this new and improved environment.

Breathe, wait, not Yet!

So last week I just went after all of the knowledge I could digest and continued my brute force attack on my mind. Then, using the previous analogy, I wanted to see how long I could “hold my breath” until I reached the water’s surface. Honestly, longer than expected, and it was totally frustrating fighting with my mind on how I thought things should work, and how they actually worked. Retraining those parts of my mind… I hated it – but with this pain, came the gains.

This morning marked one huge accomplishment, and it fuels the next “dog-paddle” sessions I have stacked up for today. Am I looking for a light at the end of some tunnel, no, just want to get back to the deep end of the pool.

After clearing a few hurtles this morning I thought I’d scribe what I accomplished. I’m not looking for site traffic or likes, nothing like that. These will be dry and boring posts about a cloud I’m working with, much like the technical blog posts I brought over to WordPress from BlogSpot years ago.

I’ve not blogged in a few years, and realized this when I wanted to share what I had learned. There’s more interesting content I could share with all of you, I just took blogging off the today list, and moved it to the “some day” list. I’d like to exercise this muscle more, much more, and will – more baby steps.

j@s