I have been wanting to get back to blogging for the past couple of months. I hate to say it but I was in a funk. Let’s just say that I was involuntarily moved and the move did not go like I thought it would. I think those that moved me thought I would embrace the move and enjoy the new position. At first I thought so as well, but it was not what I expected and within a couple of weeks I knew I needed to say something otherwise I would be changing companies. Thankfully, the management team worked with me and we settled on a date of April 20 to move back to the team I was on.
Even though the original move did not go as I planned, there were some things that I have learned which I am thankful of. First, the team I moved to uses Atlassian products Jira, Confluence and HipChat. These products I have come to learn and really like using.
Jira is a ticketing program, similar to other ticketing programs out there like Remedy and Service-Now. What I like about it is that you can do a search and it will search not just the title and description but it will search all the metadata, so if someone puts in a tag for a ticket, it will search it as well. Tagging is another thing I like about it. You can assign custom tags to each ticket which can then help in tracking and reporting.
Confluence is a wiki like program. We use it to store documentation and other knowledge base (KB) info. It is easy to use and create documents in minutes complete with charts, graphs, drawings, and tables. You can even create reports from Jira tickets within it. A great feature, like any wiki, is the ability of multiple people editing it. It also stores these edits so if someone accidentally deletes something out of the document, you can recover it.
HipChat is a instant messenging service. What I like about it is that you can create rooms for your teams and then with these rooms, you can automate postings from outside sources to post into the room. For instance, with Jira, we created an automated job to post any new ticket from Jira into the room. This allows us to see if our customers post a trouble ticket. We also post into the room when we deploy a new application release into our product. It is an easy way to both communicate but also keep track of what is going on.
So I have spent the past couple of months trying to get out of the funk as I really haven’t been enjoying what I was doing. So it was difficult to blog about it because quite honestly, I had no passion being a programmer, which is essentially what the job needed. I realized quickly that I might be an engineer but I am definitely not a code monkey. So come April 20, I will be back into the building the cloud, not building on the cloud. I look forward to it.
