I can remember when it got bad. I can look back and see all the signs, the decisions and the times of indecision, and where I was when it bubbled over. It wasn’t good and it also wasn’t the first time that it had happened to me. I was getting burned out and I needed to do something about it.

The work

At the time, work was pretty hot and heavy. We have reviews twice a year so during the time that the burn out really came to the forefront, it was during that time that the seasoned veterans know, its that heavy lifting time in order to get various projects across the finish line. You know you are no where near done, but there is a lot of grind during months 4-5 of a 6 month review cycle. The work looked something like this. I was managing 7 people, hiring my 8th. Working on creating 4 new positions so everything from job descriptions, question banks, career pathing, and how we would review these people once the positions were hired. Two of the positions were for the pilot that I was co-leading of a group of developers focused on fixing some of our tooling. Oh, did I mention that some of the work we were introducing a brand new, completely foreign hardware platform that we were quickly taking over more and more work to help support. Throw on a last minute intern program that needed to be spun up which looked a LOT like creating a new role at the 11th hour. Oh…and COVID and trying to manage both the site, the home life, and help be counselor to my team and make sure my wife wasn’t going to go nuts as winter was most definitely coming in the Midwest.

I’ll fully admit, I’m a little behind the times here in getting my repos renamed. This started back in 2020 and many companies made the switch to remove references to master/slave setups of databases and master repos in git

This was much needed change in the tech industry and one that I fully welcome.

This also meant, I have had some work to do in cleaning up my github repos both public and private branches. This has now been completed and I used the simple tutorial from git-tower.

How did we get here?

Recently I purchased a new apple watch which gave me an added benefit of 3 months of fitness+. The timing of this couldn’t be better with the watch coming in at the end of 2020 and the long winter here in the midwest settling in. Long runs outside would be on hold for a bit so what better way to spend some lunches than with some yoga or HIIT workouts.

What would you say you do here?

For the past seven years, when people have asked what do I do for work? The answer was either, “I run data centers for Facebook” or if they wanted some additional detail, “I handle the care and feeding of the server fleet”.

Both of these were true and very high level. I have been responsible for Facebook’s Altoona Iowa Data Center on the Site Operations Team. I’m a server nerd at heart and make sure that Facebook, Instagram and the other properties can be served up to connect the world. This is a challenging position and one that requires technical skill, strong partnership and influencing skills, and to build out a great team to be truly successful in what we do.