I'm reaching milestones at Carcosa Corp. Tomorrow is my one month anniversary there. In some ways it feels longer, in others it's shorter. I'm starting to get my tentacles into stuff more interesting to me, and I'm getting a rep as the guy who'll cheerfully give you a hand. As in going to people's desks to see exactly what the error is, or offering to come in early (or stay late) to get stuff done. Like tomorrow, showing up 30 min early to help the desktop guy with rolling out some workstations (I get to move the network cables, all that wiring foo at the Shoggoth Pit paying off). I'm still wrestling with getting things to work, but I'm getting into the swing of things. And I like the location, the coworkers, and definitely the commute. Oh yeah, and the money isn't bad at all. *grin*

Milestone two was tonight. I made my first change to a production server. In English, I got to make a change to something that customers use. What amuses me is having to go through the whole change process that Carcosa uses, vs what I used to do at the Shoggoth Pit. I made two system changes, and added a logrotate entry. At the Shoggoth Pit that would have been done probably been done live as the customer requested it, really minor change. At most, I'd have scheduled it for a weekend/late night change to be nice. At Carcosa, I tested it on a test box, made some changes to my plan on advice from a coworker, then set it up in a staging enviroment, then got a coworker to sanity check my change. (which took the longest), then made a service change ticket laying out all I was going to do, how it would impact, when would be the best time, and how I'd back out if there were problems. Then I got...*counts* 4? execs to approve, then had to check to see if said change would interfere with other planned stuff, then finally got approval. Then I backed up the files I planned on changing, waited til traffic stopped, made the change, tested it all kinds of ways, wrote notes on both the request ticket and the change ticket, let my two partners in crime know verbally how to roll things back, emailed the project manager letting him know it was done, and I left. So many more steps, so much more work and process...

I like it this way. Yes it's slower, but that's expected. The exec who requested the change didn't hover or push, he let things take the process. If it hadn't worked, I had time to fix things, and a plan to back out gracefully. That's how they do everything that could have customer impact. None of the 'Well we need to upgrade, and if it breaks...well, we'll try to fix it before dawn. or Monday.' Redundacy, capacity, rules that are followed. These are the things that help me sleep at night, and keep me from hovering over work email (about the only thing I can hit from remote since I'm contract). I sleep so much better, I can go to bed and read without checking my phone every little while. I don't jump when my phone goes off. This is what I needed.

It's not perfect, I get in way early (for me), I have to attend way many meetings. Sometimes I am very confused as to what's going on. I spend a lot of time twitching my way through various versions of software, and ye gods I wish I was running at least one Linux workstation. (I do a lot of Windows stuff that is just easier to do in a Windows workstation). I miss having a remote connection to home. But I don't need the lifeline like I did.

So here's to my first month, and my first prod change, and to a happy fox. Tomorrow I'll be in early, and probably leaving early. Definitely going to get some celebratory dinnerness, and watch fun movies. Go me :)