It is Sunday afternoon; a winter storm is in the process of bringing record lows to Houston. There is a power shortage, and brown outs are likely. We are doing all that we can to conserve power. Brainy Bird and I are working in the kitchen, so we can have a single light on. Everything electrical device in the house is unplugged and turned off except the kitchen light, internet, security system and Brainy Bird’s workstation. Even our natural gas furnace is on just enough to keep our pipes from freezing. I am not actually sure how much power the furnace uses. I know that components of it are electric. I am on my laptop, with a plan of working until my battery goes out.
The four fur kids are in an adorable state, all snuggled up by the fireplace. Little Chirp is fast asleep, napping under a pile of blankets. He does not have much else to do on this cold winter day.
Brainy Bird is on Zoom working through his first major production outage. The website of the start up that he has been doing work for the past two years is completely down. A “grown up” developer was hired to fix some URL issues with the site, and the “grown up” did something that resulted in a complete outage of the site hosted on AWS. This outage is a disaster on several fronts, first the owner of the site has zero revenue as long as the site is down. The income for the company comes from sponsored links, and without a site, there is zero traffic, which means zero revenue. For Brainy Bird, this alone is immensely stressful as he is committed to making the owner of the start up a success. A major add to the stress is the fact that the site is a part of every college admission and scholarship application that Brainy Bird has submitted over the past six months. Anyone that is currently reviewing his applications is likely to look at the site, and they will find the site is not operational. Yikes!
Ironically, Brainy Bird is on Zoom with of my coworkers that knows AWS. The coworker is walking Brainy Bird through basic AWS troubleshooting. One of the core values of the company that I work for is to invest in the success of the next generation. This is a beautiful example of commitment to these core values.
Listening to the discussion, I am wondering if we should be building our company services out beyond energy consulting. My coworker that Brainy Bird is getting help from is one of the most junior AWS resources on our team. The guy is a machine running Brainy Bird through the troubleshooting. If this is our company’s idea of a junior resource, imagine what our advanced resources can accomplish.
I am praying that Brainy Bird and my coworker can get the site up and running today. Once this site is up and running, Brainy Bird will be free the rest of the day to spend time with Little Chirp. I am hoping that hot cocoa for the boys, a glass of wine for me, and Yahtzee by the fireplace with the fur kids are in store for us tonight.