It’s been a month since I started my full-time position on the Cloud Automation Engineering Team at VMware. Since then, I have experienced many “OMG, I can’t believe I just did that!! 💁🏽♀️” moments paired with an equal amount of “Oh shit, I can’t believe I just did that…🤦🏽♀️” moments. Starting a new job is never easy, and it always takes time to ramp up on technical skills and become knowledgeable about the product and services that the team offers. Just as I was gaining some familiarity with everything in the workplace, the coronavirus outbreak forced myself and all other employees to start working from home. As a result, I’ve had to adapt to new challenges in order to continue ramping up in the team and remain just as productive.
For the majority of the first month, I worked with others to add a new feature (I’ll call it Feature X for confidentiality 🤫) to the vRealize Automation Cloud product. This feature would allow integration with a DevOps tool (such as GitLab/GitHub) and our Cloud Assembly platform, so customers can easily create and deploy blueprints using common cloud components.
My task within the Feature X scrum team served as the perfect way for me to learn a lot about the services we provide, our codebase, customer use cases, internal technologies used within the team to test code, debugging strategies, standard coding guidelines, the code review process, and strategies used to prioritize certain features right before a release. Of course, learning all of these things required the help and insight of many of my team members who continued to guide and mentor me amidst the whole WFH situation.
My first major achievement was when I finally sent in a code review for my Feature X task; the git message that displayed in my terminal was immensely satisfying. Unfortunately, this moment was followed by a bombardment of Slackbot notifications coming from the Jenkins pipeline that all included the word “failed” in the message. Normally I would have walked over to someone’s desk and tried to get some insight into the situation. However, due to the current predicament, I was left to stare at my computer from home as I was drowning in worry. Thankfully, I reached out to a coworker and she explained the different tests that the Jenkins pipeline consists of over a Zoom meeting. The fixes that solved the issues were simple, but had I not been able to receive the proper help while working from home, I would have been stuck with no other resources to rely on. Therefore, I learnt early on that in order to be successful on the team as a new hire during these WFH times, I would need to be creative with the modes in which I reach out to and communicate with my coworkers.
Another such learning experience occurred for me after I changed two small tooltip labels for our GitHub and GitLab integrations. It was such a simple change that I ended up overlooking some of the details in the UI. Flash forward to a week later when I was testing some code and realized that the tooltip labels I had changed earlier were not at all showing up in the browser as I had expected! I quickly figured out the issue and resolved it; thankfully no one judged me for my mistake and I received advice on how to get my code prioritized and merged ASAP! It was a messy situation to be in but I definitely learnt something from it…test your code thoroughly, no matter how small the change 🙃
These two experiences taught me quite a bit, but when I look at the bigger picture, I realize just how much I’ve learnt in the past month. As you can see from the pipeline diagram below, I’ve had quite the journey between first cloning the repository and eventually merging my code…
Ever since working from home, I’ve reminisced on the simplest of things I used to do at VMware…swiping my badge in the morning, taking my lunch break to frequently visit the turtles near Prom, and enjoying the camaraderie of the people on my floor. It’s the small things that I miss, but after reflecting on my first month, I’ve come to realize there is a bright side to this WFH situation after all…
The fact that I have continued to remain productive with ramping up on this team while working remotely means that my coworkers and manager have enabled me enough and given me the right tools I need to succeed at work. Oddly enough, I’ve also had more chances to engage in conversation with my coworkers over Zoom calls and Slack because of the whole COVID-19 situation. I feel that I’ve been able to form a special bond with my team, which under normal circumstances would have taken me months to reach the same level of connection. In a way, this whole WFH situation has been a good trust exercise for me to realize that my team has my back no matter what 😄
Special thanks to my manager/mentor anjali mangal for her support!
