As this year comes to an end, I wanted to retrospect the timeline of events occurred. I had an interesting year, a story that I can remember to motivate and push barriers out of my way in future. It’s not because I have seen few success but my pursuit to redefine and recharge my spirit to survive in the ever-changing world of IT. Here is my experience…

First half

This year started with a bang, had an opportunity to anchor brand new BigData project. I had a great time designing systems, building frameworks, leading brainstorming sessions, working with stakeholders and yet not missing out an action (oh yeah!, I love doing coding and excited to solve non-trivial tasks). It was a demanding work because of the choices I made; learned a ton of stuff and great synergy with my peers.

Second half

The other half of the year was in a completely different zone; less familiar and the results were not guaranteed unless outperform the tasks.

It is a challenge that I have self-signed to create own opportunities, innovate, collaborate and influence panel of judges/representatives across the organization.

Of course, I was also doing my daily task as a typical software engineer. I strongly believed that I should get indulged in kinda work outside my comfort zone to shape through my career further and I was prepared to start-off from beginning.

Right investment

I kick-started the change with Kubernetes Administrator Certification (CKA), it’s not an easy feat for someone who was having k8s hands-on experience in months by then. My strong foundational knowledge accompanied by rigorous planning, execution and practice worked out well. CKA completion earned some respect among my peers and opened few doors for collaboration.

Connections

It is quite important to build reliable connections in our work life. This is easily one of the hard-hitting realizations in this year. Nirmal Parekh, my ex-team member for whom I have a big respect, reached me to check my interest in participating “AMI Ready In 60 Seconds” hackathon, internal to Capital One. Needless to say, I agreed to join with him in less than an hour. I got introduced to quite some talented engineers through this collaboration. We had a decent idea to begin with, enhanced along the way and won the second place among 40+ teams competed in the event.

Innovation

As Tony stark was getting prepared to combat Thanos; all my previous work, right from CKA, was a preparation to compete in Innergize ’18 although I have not planned it, just happened!

Innergize is a Capital one premier hackathon event occurs every year. Associates were asked to submit their ideas across Capital one work locations (6 states). Out of 150+ submissions, 15 teams from 3 competing categories were shortlisted for the initial round and invited to hack at 2 days event. My submission was selected and retained almost the same team from the previous hackathon. I have done quite some preparation, prototypes for a week which assisted me to maintain a consistent routine of going to bed at 5 AM (anyways, nothing new! it’s the same from starting this year). The effort got paid-off, our solution got shortlisted as a direct finalist in one of the competing categories and earned 5K as a result.

Collaboration

As the competition was moved to the next phase, so be our solution. We re-architected the solution from the ground-up (you will see it in my blog soon), identified epics, created tasks and weekly catch-up to track status.

We were trying to solve challenges that are very edgy and some dependencies are still in alpha phase. I worked with the open-source communities especially Openfaas, k8s communities (now you see CKA connection 😉_)_ to bring life to our solution.

It was pretty solid, edgy, original and never-seen attempt, yet we did not win the title.

But the experience was worth the effort; building and managing a team and bringing an idea to life and pitching the solution to the panel of judges (who are either CTO or Chief Architect or Vice president from a different line of business) and it was a unique opportunity to meet and receive direct feedback about our solution.

It’s really worth it

More collaboration

While working on the solution for Innergize final competition, I was also working on my technical talk for SECON (Capital one, internal software engineering conference) collaborating with Anirudh Molala, this time. Literally turned my local Starbucks store as my temporary office post 6 pm. If not all day, Anirudh and myself never failed to meet every alternative day that includes weekends. I had no choice as two intensive work going in parallel, day and night. I would like to thank Anirudh at this moment for adjusting to my schedule. The talk was a great success, received good appreciation for our effort and created opportunities to implement for business use cases in the coming year.

I made a sincere effort to work out of my comfort zone; built connections, collaborated across teams, fostered innovation and performed the best of my abilities as of this year.

I believe it’s a good attempt, sought a seed for the future. I know, the best is yet to be delivered and i will try never stop trying!