Pim van Pelt
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65 lines
4.3 KiB
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title: "Week 14, Sunday: Archiving Sabbatical"
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date: 2024-11-03T21:55:00+02:00
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---
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{{< image frame="true" width="17em" float="right" src="/img/headline/soulfulliquid-03.png" alt="Credit: Soulful Liquid, YouTube" >}}
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## Pictures of the Day
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Well, I guess that's it for this blog. I will spend one more day care-free and then tomorrow, I will
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start work again, in a different building, with a different manager and team, and with a
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significanly different mission.
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I will say that I really really needed this. I didn't know how much I needed it fourteen weeks ago
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when I started my break. I've been doing Site Reliability Engineering for 18+ years at this company,
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and very strongly identify with the discipline of reliability engineering. I've built some of the
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most high performing SRE teams at Google, possibly the planet, in my first 10 years of tenure as a
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manager. I'm looking at you, Geo SRE and Identity SRE. Then, I spent the next ~8 years as an
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individual contributor working on _Production 2020_, the re-imagination of the internal control and
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management plane of Google services, where I got to help teams in the areas of observability
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(Automon!), change management (Annealing!), capacity (Autocap!), and incident response (OMG!)
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through initiation, childhood and adolescence. I am incredibly proud of those teams, their ambition,
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drive, and most importantly their unique subject matter expertie. These are some of the most
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talented and dedicated software and systems engineers I have ever met.
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Next week, I'll fly to New York to properly integrate into a new (software engineering) team at
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Google: Core Developer. If I compare it to the P2020 stuff, it's a natural fit in a way. Google has
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a huge amount of infrastructure to facilitate the software development life cycle with thing that
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come _to the left of_ devops or SRE. It starts all the way to the left with editors and IDEs (like
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Cider with its upcoming AI functionality), but also think about the source versioning control
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(Piper), or the build system (Blaze and Forge), or Google's Continuous Integration systems (TAP,
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Guitar, ITS), and the release tool that hands over the fully tested and ready-to-rock binary
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artefacts to our P2020 Rollouts tool.
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My move into Core Developer will be an exploration of the lefthand side of this SDLC, and a specific
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mission together with Brian and his leadership team to advance the state of the art in software
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development in two ways. Firstly, we have an existing private cloud at Google called Borg. It's
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hugely popular and hosts most all of Google's products inside of it. I've grown up in Borg, and
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designed and operated largs parts of the tooling ecosystem that manipulates it. But we have a
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second, more rapidly growing environment: Google Cloud. The look-and-feal of GCP is different, in
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many ways superior (and in some ways inferior) to Borg. Secondly, I think there's no stopping the AI
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revolution. I am seeing interesting trends in software engineering, the industry is starting to move
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more towards a set of tools that can generate the code from _other artefacts_, such as for example a
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_Product Requirements Document_. I don't know yet if we'll truly be successful, but I do see that
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if we are, that the SDLC will drastically change.
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I celebrated my last day in the morning with Johnny at Milandia playing Padel. On the way back, I
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took a long bikeride to mentally prepare myself for this new part of my journey. I will be
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dedicating the next few years of my life figuring out, together with Core Developer and SRE's
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Production 2020 teams, how to evolve our tools to be both _Cloud Native_ as well as _Agentic_. And
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that's going to be a lot of fun.
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Melancholically, I will say that this is the last of ninety-eight short stories about my day.
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Knowing that I've done this before (for example on many roadtrips with my best friend WEiRD), I am
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confident that I will be re-reading this story from time to time. Wish me luck!
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{{< gallery-category >}}
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{{< gallery-photo fn="2024-11-03/IMG_2315.JPG" caption="My Trusty Stromer at Milandia" >}}
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{{< gallery-photo fn="2024-11-03/IMG_2317.JPG" caption="Johnny and I are playing Padel" >}}
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{{< gallery-photo fn="2024-11-03/IMG_2318.JPG" caption="I bike home past the airplane museum at Dubendorf airport" >}}
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{{< /gallery-category >}}
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{{< gallery-modal >}}
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{{< gallery-script >}}
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