Opening New Doors To New Possibilities
Recent Training
This week I took a three-day training course on “Architecting for AWS”. Even though I’ve been playing around with Cloud tech as a kind of background, slow-burn, learning curve I jumped at the opportunity of a free place on a course and finally got some official and formal AWS classroom training. It proved to be a helpful mix of theory and hands-on practice in some pre-prepared lab scenarios.
I enjoyed the experience and it was fun to hear what some of my colleagues on the course had been getting up to putting the AWS technologies to work for different customer accounts and projects. This was a big tick on my ToDo List. Yay! 😊
This week I also finished off a few mandatory CBT modules (this time it was Cyber Security stuff) that we get asked to do once in a while. I must admit these were certainly not as interesting as the AWS training although they are important to our business and so just as necessary. (They were a necessary tick on my ToDo List.)
Needless to say, I learnt a lot this week.
Approximate Training
Training about theory and the different technology choices available are just a sample taste of the possibilities of how technologies might be combined and used for constructing solutions.
It’s necessary to know the detail behind the acronyms and an opportunity to get hands-on can take you from “dipping your toe in”, to getting “knee deep” pretty quickly but the actual SME level knowledge comes from going way past “what it says on the tin” to joining all of the dots together to build a fully operable solution where each component technology is known intimately (including its limitations and perhaps “quirky” or exaggerated way of working).
Not everything we get to pick up and use is necessarily fit for purpose or truly production ready these days.
Possibilities And Opportunities
To me, training is always about opening the doors to creative possibilities and a great opportunity to ask relevant questions (of both instructors and colleagues) but I don’t expect it to give me the deep subject knowledge that comes only from long term exposure and the deliberate intent of making something work as part of a solution.
Deep knowledge often has a list of adjacent skills and knowledge that must also be acquired in parallel.
Almost Production Ready
Picking up and combining technologies is very quick and easy to do these days. In fact, some would say it’s far too easy and almost misleading and that “the devil is in the detail”. The drive to get something into live production can often be tripped up by these “small details” but I won’t argue with the approach of getting something started quickly and then rapidly iterating through an improvement lifecycle – even if it means starting again downstream with a different approach or different technologies.
Learning technologies on the job can be fun but we never want to be in the situation of saying “if we’d known then what we know now, we’d never have done it that way!”. This is were having the right mindset to approaching new technology adoption comes in.
Every Project Is Different
One of the things I like about my job is that it is both creative and challenging. No two projects are alike and learning comes from every project. I’ve lost count of how many projects I’ve done over the years and the array of tools, technologies and techniques I’ve used is vast. I’ve sure learnt a lot from doing it.
Show Me – Don’t Tell Me
Experience has taught me that “proving” is a big and necessary part of solution development. It’s one thing to string things together, it’s another to make them secure, performant, operational, reliable, available, usable, cost efficient etc. It’s a whole team effort which takes a certain mindset to achieve.
The mindset is in recognising that building serious solutions is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s knowing that just because something claims to do something useful doesn’t mean that it will do it well.
The Challenge Remains The Same
To me, the challenge remains the same. Come up with a solution: make it work, do it on time, do it well.
What’s different these days is how many choices we have at the start and how great the expectations and demands are that are placed on us by our customers.
If it was easy, it probably wouldn’t be worth doing! 😊
Thankfully, training is always opening new doors to new possibilities …
Thank you for liking this page.
Tim Simpson
11th July, 2019
#LifeAtCapgemini