How It Started

The search for a proper way of doing job especially as someone working in cloud computing industry keeps me bothered all the time. Even within some company operation method doesnt seems adaptable to whom planning to have last longing career at one place as someone should in bed. The fragility of growth for individuals too obvious. The engineers keep doing the same things and repeated over time. Stagnant knowledge level for a long period. No new inputs shared by others. Knowledge become individuals secrets not teams. The change of colleagues more frequent than servicing my car.

All talks but this circle might be impossible to completely address. We are human in nature btw, unpredictable. The least I could do is to think the best out of it and eventually the good thing happened. I am not alone.

Meeting Like-Minded People

D.O is a colleague of mine under the hood of AWS Partner company for about a year plus. Long story short even when we were in different company, meetup at cafe and basically discussed on few keynotes items:

1. Product Engineering Mindset
2. Shifting Infra Left
3. Growth Cultures
4. Establish Platform Engineering Team

We aware that these are not something like plan today, execute tomorrow and get results few days after. We are not the expert in those domains but we understand the good things that could be possibly achieved. Again, meeting the right people that shared the same mindset is something to be grateful and treasured.

Product Engineering Mindset

The idea behind this is that eventhough we are within the servicing business providing consultation to clients, the way we should operate internally follows the Product Engineering philosophy of building valuable, usable, maintainable product or in our case, services.

Adopting the mindset aims at least to improve the way we deliver our consultation to clients effectively (user-centric thinking). Not just executing any requested task instead what are actually clients required to have to solve their issues or challenges. This practically required the ability to work with cross-functional teams (cross-functional collaboration) with the objective of acquire faster feedbacks (iterative development). At the end of the day, we hope each team members to own the projects or services end-to-end from idea to operations to user feedback.

Shifting Infra Left

Less manual tasks gives more space for innovation. Thats what we thought on how having infra automation in place could benefits us. Engineers repeatedly involved in a project that required the same skillset and knowledge but still need to spend almost the same amount of time (like first few times project involved) to deliver it successfully. This mindset generally demands infra engineers to work on developing Infrastructure as a Code (IaC) and automation. Another new world need to be explored by the engineers but that should be something worth to invest isnt it.

Growth Cultures

Some people I met openly reluctant for changes and that indirectly brings teams morale on passive/defensive stands. The others will question the benefits of bringing innovation if no one would embrace it internally. This negative vibes often left unaddressed. Slowly engineers become isolated minding his own jobs and become dormant. Company would not be able to innovate faster than its competitor and increase the risk of becoming irrelevant in its market.

Basically there's more that for us to implement this idea of growth cultures. The main idea is that for any team members collaboratively to upskill each other and having a sense of ownership. The frequency of having knowledge sharing session, open feedback and discussion, specialize in specific domain and owns it, are something we would cherish to see it happened.

Having a Platform Team

The statistics of company having Platform Team internally has shown a rise in numbers. According to Gartner, they predicted about 80% of Software Engineering company would embrace Platform Engineering by 2026 Gartner Press Release Nov 2023. We too are in the midst of design and planning phase of adopting the Platform Engineering. Considering the ideas of embracing Product Engineering mindset and Shifting Infra Left, we see this is something we would like to have internally. Not just developing internal tools to address internal problem, Platform Team intended to initiate and retain the cultures.

I am with a team of less than 15 members in total as this writing published and this is my cloud journey