thedeployguy

Switching Teams within IBM

June 18, 2017

IBM Logo

Welcome back guys, this week I taught I would write a bit more of a personal post. Over the past few weeks, I have been doing interviews and getting ready to switch Teams / Companies because of some recent changes. I won’t get into too much detail on what happened but just a typical end of life cycle for projects. Anyway, after doing a few interviews I am officially changing teams within IBM.

As many of you may know, for the past 3.5 years I have been working on SmartCloud DevOps Team. When I first started, I was thrown into the deep-end with working mainly on Operations for Smartcloud. Not long after starting I was given my first Automation/Development task. I still remember exactly what I was asked to do, create an automation script to deploy a “single sided” environment. We already had a script that worked for “Two-sided” environments but it didn’t work for “one-sided” because of various issues I won’t go into. Most of our automation was/is written in Python so this script would have had to be developed in Python. Coming into this role I had no experience with Python so the script took me a bit longer as I was also learning the language. After 1 or 2 weeks and testing the code, I checked it in and my code was ready for use. That started a long line of Automation tasks around making our deployments more hands off and trying to automate as much of our manual tasks as possible.

3 years and many many projects later mostly around Deployment Automation, I switched to helping our Security Team automate a lot of their manual tasks. There was a huge amount of work to do and deadlines for everything. Since there was little automation around Security, there was a lot of freedom around the technologies I wanted to use. While my time in the security team was shorter than I expected it was a good experience and I learned a lot, specifically around how servers become vulnerable to attacks/hacks.

There is a very condensed summary of my 3+ years so far at IBM. I have worked with a lot of amazing people on the team and I appreciated every moment of it. Now it is time for me to move teams and onto what should be a very exciting project. I will be joining the Innovation Exchange Team as a Senior Software Engineer, the team mainly focuses around H2020 projects. I am very excited about what the future holds and I am excited to be working on something brand new!

I hope you guys enjoyed this post, I usually like talking about random technologies but it is also sort of a personal journal for me. Let me know if you guys have had experiences with switching teams or roles lately would love to hear how it went.

Thanks

Jason


Personal Blog by Jason Lloyd.
I talk about programming, life, self-development and everything in-between.