Lessons Learned

The week has been tough on me.. well that isn’t really true since the week isn’t some evil mastermind, holding a white cat, sitting in a tower somewhere, causing all sorts of trouble. No, the week has been tough because I tried to cut some corners and fell flat on my face.

I know better than trying to push something to production without doing a load test. I know better than looking for overly complex problems instead of simple ones staring me in the face. I just plain know better. But no one is perfect, I’m definitely not, that’s for sure.

I spent Monday thru Wednesday, investigating little things, blaming big things, tearing my hair out while looking for possible clues. I could easily have spent the rest of this week and next doing that. It’s very easy to do when trying to track down performance issues after a big release. But, I have a very smart boss who obviously saw me flailing a bit, took me aside and refocused me on a more pressing issue. The release we tried to get out could easily be broken into smaller chunks. Nothing in it was super urgent!. Instead, some actual operational issues were urgent so she put my focus on those. And it helped greatly.

I worked thru previous work I had done dealing with Solr index replication and I was able to test and push to production over the span of an afternoon and evening. I’ll have more to say about Solr replication in another post.

So, I have re-learned lessons this week. I’m the one who caused all of my headaches. I have a great boss. And, when you push something to production that goes smoothly, any problems from earlier in the week tend to get minimized in your mind.