Right now I’m working at a fairly big hosting company as a Cloud Engineer, which is a fancy word for a Developer position who does ops things and all in so called cloud environment (like AWS). So, I’m a developer, a system administrator and an infrastructure engineer in one position.

It’s fine, I like it… mostly. I came here to work with Docker, Kubernetes, Go, Python and basically anything other than PHP, Ruby or JavaScript. Well, turned out, I’m working with PHP and Ruby. In the last 5 years I tried to grab every single opportunity to start or join a project that uses my desired tech-stack. Now it seems, finally I can do it. We started to shift away to Kubernetes with Go tools. Later we can inject more and more Go applications in our workflow.

But this post is not about this. I mean partly, but not about what am I doing to pay my monthly bills. I like learning and experiment with psychology, especially with cognitive psychology. Today, not strictly connected, but found interesting how my dev life experiences changed my mind about given music products.

Everything started around 4 years ago. I was moved to a different team in the company. We started to solve a really hard problem and as a team, we were so dedicated to do that. That time, I really enjoyed what I do and that team helped me a lot. For example one of the team members is still one of the most valuable human beings in my life. I learned a lot on how to separate a huge chunk of a monolith application to… well two smaller but still huge monolith applications.

Later, when we were done, out team got a new name, but we did basically the same. Solving difficult problems, design the solution and implement it. When we were done with the next one, we got a new name and again a new name with new problems. We got some new members and lost a few ones. We started to shift away from problems, to maintain the consistency of our main application (the one we cut down from the even bigger monolith). At the end, I was the last one in the team from the original team composition. I’m still kind of the oldest gatekeeper for this application, and still guarding, nothing can pass in with bad patterns, formatting or basically anything that would make this mammoth into a monster.

So I mentioned music in the title. Yes. So there was a team where we had a project manager (let’s call that project manager as C). Mostly we did not have one, we were an autonomous group. At the beginning it was a bit frustrating that after 3 years we have someone who tells us what is important and what’s not. Our daily stand-up meeting were a bit spontaneous, everyone knew everything and it was like 5 minutes to talk about like… mostly obstacles. After C arrived, it was much longer. We used all 30 minutes we booked for that event. It was 30 minutes because usually we did some bug triaging after stand-up. As a result, we had no time to groom our backlog or check bugs if they are valid or not. We really did not want to add an extra event (and meeting) for them, so we decided to set a timer at 15 minutes and that’s the end of the stand-up and the other half can be refinement or bug triaging.

We always forgot it and finally C set up an alert on their phone. After 15 minutes, it started to play Africa from Toto. I did not like that song at all, but as an alarm, it’s fine. C is still one of the best PM I ever met and I’m so grad I could work with C. Right now C is not the project manager of our team, but it’s fine we have a new one and I’m so happy we have the new one too. So overall I’m happy with both of them.

I worked as a team with C like 2 years and with that alarm we spent around one year. Two years passed and today, Spotify gave me a song in a random playlist and it was Africa from Toto. AS I heard the first new notes, I could instantly identify the song and felt some kind of happiness. Yes, I started to like the song because it can give me good memories, even that I did not like that song and alarm that time.

It’s a long post about nothing. This post has no real meaning, but still it’s me. It became part of me. And because I love Danny… I mean Danny’s voice, I put their version of Africa here.

Sit back, enjoy and peace ;)