STARR Stories Flashcards
Git Code Reviews
Situation: Business moved to Git
Task: Lead code reviews with team members
Action:
Learned the tool
Established process with peers, release and feature branches
Scheduled Reviews
Reviewed code with peers
Worked with developer
Improvements
Constructive feedback and guidance
Merge conflicts
Result:
Upskilled the team massively
Fully onboarded with git
Code quality improved
Reflection:
Gained technical skills
Became better at giving constructive feedback
Tested my own knowledge
Training Delivery
Situation: Business had purchased new replication tool
Task: Design and deliver training sessions
Action:
Identified appropriate level of material
Planned out sessions - broke up into topics
Scheduled hands-on recorded sessions
Result:
onboarded delivery engineers
business reduced deployment times
free’d up my own teams resources
recorded sessions for future use
Reflection:
Consolidate my knowledge
Presentation final step in learning and growth
Highlighted a lack of vendor training
Downside to purchasing cheapest product
OEM Maint
Situation: Oracle on EC2, No OEM monitoring during OEM maintenance
Task: Automate cron monitoring during OEM downtime
Action:
Partnered with AMS to develop a best practice strategy using systems manager automation documents
Used central account to drive automation, with business accounts as children
Worked on IAM policies for cross-account automation document execution
sign-off by management on both sides
Tested automation
Developed script to invoke central automation doc using federated login
User testing and training
Result:
Fallback monitoring during OEM maintenance
Reflection:
Great collaboration with AMS
Blueprint for future projects
Developed systems manager skills
Multi-Region
Situation: Business needed apps running in multi-regions
Task: Deliver stalled multi-region process with HVR-tool
Action:
Reviewed architects plan - too complicated
Multiple configurations, major version upgrades
Looked at options - EFS native replication too slow, data-sync not tested by the storage architects
Redesigned architecture, removing version upgrade
Utilized existing replication flows
Hosted regular calls with business architects and vendor to sign-off design
set-up POC
tested dataflows with python script, inc collision detection rules
Presentations and training on design
Result:
Business had multi-region pattern
Simplified design for all use cases
Easier for decom
Dates changing had no impact
Reflection:
Gained confidence in leading
Personal sacrifice
Could have engaged delivery teams earlier
Bring HVR envs to standard
Situation: Rollout of builds had too many manual steps
Task: Convert to IAC, codepipeline
Action:
Looked at importing exiting resources
Analyzed existing builds
Exciting / Interesting but too complicated
Too much variation
Settled on a migration plan with pgdump
new builds (target) could use latest CF templates
POC
Documented with some automation
Result:
Easy to handover to delivery teams
All older envs brought to standard with repeatable process
consistency across all builds
big reduction in incidents / outages
Reflection:
Going with the right solution rather than the interesting one
Ability to let go of initial ideas
HVR POC
Situation: Business needed bi-directional, hetrogenious replication from datacentre to the AWS cloud
Task: Perform a HVR POC (2 week estimate)
Action:
Read HVR manual over the weekend
Worked closely with the HVR vendor to understand data and tool
setup envs for pilot BU applications
worked with BU on their data
had to take myself of off step functions / SAM project
Result:
Business able to make informed decision on tool
Criteria for replication met
saved company upfront costs
Uncovered many bugs in HVR
Reflection:
Huge personal sacrifice
Showed lots of flexibility, commitment, personal ownership
Perhaps could have tried to stay on other project
HVR performance tuning
Situation: POC completed, business needed replication latency tuned
Task: Work with vendor to improve performance
Action:
re-configured replication chyannels with issues
parallelization
Turned off colission detection
Worked with AWS
Worked through entire stack
Bugs, architetcure, re-config
Result:
Performance goals achieved
Business sign-off
Reflection:
Don’t assume vendor has all the answers
Keep steakholders informed of issues and actions
IAC CI/CD Adoption
Situation: Business had opinionated tooling for IAC
Task: Align builds with latest IAC process
Action:
Lots of collabortaion with internal groups
had to find SMEs
Refactored builds
set-up and tested pipelines
Worked with business steakholders on their changes
Result:
Aligned with standards
Business had control of their builds
Platforms had control of architecture standards
Repeatable IAC build
Reflection:
Highlighted strengths, anthusiasm, collobarating
Learning new skills
Opportunity to get others more involved
SNow Automations
Situation: Group wanted to call DB maint via SNow forms
Task: Work with SMEs to create a end-to-end process for invoking via SNow
Action:
Worked with SNow team to create front-end and back-end orchestration
Worked with IBM core team on strategic cloud orchestrator tool
Updated DB management scripts to work with IBM ICO
Integrated tools after unit testing
Tested end-to-end automation
Presented solution to steakholders, inc training
Result:
Working, callable automations via SNow
Slow due to tools
Difficult to report on large activities
Had to sell idea to customers
Reflection:
Exposue to lots of javascript and SNow dev
Customers should have been more involved
pre-cloud
subject to individual groups roadmaps
C@C
Situation: Business wanted to test Oracle C@C
Task: Validate C@C API
Action:
Worked with another technical lead on project
Python testing framework alreday underway
Divided up tests between us
Extended code base
Result:
Fully tested C@C APIs
Uncovered critical issues leading to Oracle making changes and business pulling out
Upskilled in python and C@C
Reflection:
Able to allow others to lead
not precious about having control
Opportunity to learn from peers
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Task:
Action:
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