Nigel Babu

In May 2020, I went past a quiet miletone. I completed 10 years in the IT industry. I remember interviewing for my first job. In retrospect, what they wanted was a (Techical) Program Manager. During my interview, they realised that I can code and they decided to see how I would do given a programming task. I did reasonably well, based off my experience in the Open Source community. I got assigned more work and tasks that required learning entirely new things. I’d like to think I did reasonably well. I can’t remember much of that job other than building out custom CMSes from scratch. Since then, I’ve worked as a sysadmin, a web developer, conference organiser, a tree sheriff, a CI architect, and as a Corporate Operations Engineer.

I’ve really found that what I enjoy doing is the sort of work that is a blend of Operations and Software Engineering. Working on purely Software Engineering projects tire me out – when people take no notice of the operational implications of their work or how the deployment of the software works. Too much operations make me frustrated that we’re putting out fires but not spending enough time fixing long-term issues or evaulating how to get out of the hole we’ve dug for ourselves.

When I started my career, I knew mostly PHP and Python. Over the years, I spent a lot more time strengthening my Python experience and picking up some Javascript along the way. Not a lot of it, mind you, but just enough to be able to read code and understand what it does. Recently, I’ve used a lot more PowerShell and Golang. I’m teaching myself modern C++, it’s a very different language from the one I learned in school. I’m surprised that I can understand Java though I wouldn’t be able to write anything from scratch in it. I’ve now maintained in some shape or form – Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Debian, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and most recently Windows.

I’ve worked in offices and from home. Looking back, I think I’ve spent more time at home than I have spent at an office. In the current crisis, I find myself more prepared thanks to that reserve of experience. It took a little bit of time to find my rhythm, but now I’m productive but not overworking. I wake up at 5 am, and start my day sipping tea and planning out my schedule based on my todo list. Once I’m sure I’ve aligned them correctly, I go for a run or try to do some strength workouts at home. The latter is challenging. I find it easier to lace up and go outside for a run. Then, it’s shower followed by breakfast. I glance at my emails to estimate how much time I need to spend on dealing with them. The advantage of US West coast emailing me is that replies can usually wait. When I start my day, I do code reviews and then my own coding. I prefer to do my reviews first, when I’m really fresh, and then get into writing my own code. I protect my morning hours furiously, because it’s my most productive time. Around 12, I break for long-ish lunch break. After lunch, I get to my emails and other administrivia. Then, I have another coding block or time for another big chunk of work. Sometimes, it’s chasing down a particularly nasty bug. From around 3 pm, the focus is beginning to fade and from here on out, most of my meetings happen. I tend to make a plan for the next right about now. I have an alarm that rings at 6:30 pm. That’s the deadline where I will stop work. I may look back at it later, but that’s after dinner and some time with the guitar.

I thought when I moved my website to WordPress, I’d blog more. If anything, I’ve blogged less. But hey, I have a good reason. About 4 months ago, I moved to Dublin, Ireland. This was to start my job at The Search Engine company. Today I finish 4 months in Dublin. It feels like much more. It’s been an interesting and stressful few months. All the research we did for the months before we moved helped out. It came in especially handy while house hunting.

Ever since I got here, I feel like I’ve been trying to get things done to get my life stable. The first task was finishing up all my paperwork and initial setup tasks. So, registering with immigration, getting my PPS number, and getting setup with a phone. Once I had the essentials, the next step was finding an apartment. The Dublin rental scene is particularly stressful but thankfully, I had relocation assistance. We’re often better at research and we actually found the apartment ourselves. We used the relocation folks to negotiate the lease and help with the initial tasks of moving in.

We now live in a quiet North Dublin suburb. It’s so quiet that the loudest noise is often the sound of our ears ringing from the sheer silence. The beach is a short walk away, but we can’t see it from the apartment. My morning commute is a comfortable 45 mins by bus and train or about 25 mins by bicycle. On a good weather day, I cycle in to work. Living here, I realise how people run in the afternoon. The weather in the afternoon is actually often pleasant and not the kind that tries to kill you.

The job itself is interesting. I’m in a role that I have enjoyed a lot in the past. It’s a mix of doing ops work as a sysadmin and a bit of doing automation. The idea is to automate as much away as possible from our day to day ops work. My team has 10 of us in two different time zones who manage to do way more work than it should be possible for us. The biggest different from my previous jobs is that I work with Windows more often. It’s fun to learn new things. Everything is different and sometimes, things don’t work because Windows.

Feb 12th was my last day at Red Hat. I sent a very similar version of this blog post as a note to my colleagues as well. It’s been a fun nearly 3 years working at Red Hat and wearing the Red Hat fedora[1]. I’ve had a wonderful time working for Red Hat both from the New Delhi and the Mumbai offices. I’ve enjoyed the odd visits to Bangalore over the last few years. I’m very grateful for my time here and it’s time to move onto bigger adventures elsewhere.

In 2015, I did not think that a chance conversation with Sankarshan at FUDCon Pune would lead to interviewing at Red Hat 6 months down the line and subsequently working here. Over my 11-year career, this is the first time I’ve had a fantastic manager who has been both a friend and a mentor. Remote work is challenging in general. I could not have pulled off dealing with the various challenges if it weren’t for Sankarshan’s help and encouragement. I’m grateful for the office mangers in Delhi and Mumbai for giving me a second home for when I wanted to meet people[2].

I’m leaving here with great memories, friendships, and great lessons learned. I’ve had the opportunity to help stabilise Gluster infrastructure. When I look back to how things looked, I’m grateful that it’s a sea of change. I could not have been successful at Red Hat without the help of folks in my team in Gluster and in other parts of Red Hat. In particular, I’m grateful to Sankarshan, Alfredo, Amye, Atin, Jeff Darcy, John Strunk, Nithya, and Shyam.

The fondest and funniest memory of my time at Red Hat is going to be about that time when Jenkins started speaking French. If you don’t remember or you don’t know about this, you should read the post-mortem[3] for that failure. I wrote a blog post about it last week as well.

I will no longer be a Red Hat employee, but I’m still going to be a Gluster community member. I’ve been on Freenode for than 10 years and I suspect I’ll continue to be there for many years to come. If you want to stay in touch, IRC is going to be the best way to reach me and have me respond.

[1]: I didn’t actually get my Red Hat Fedora, but let’s not get into semantics 😛
[2]: Or just sit in air conditioning.
[3]: Unless you want to talk to me about an infra issue, in which case, file a bug 😀