So this week has been a bit rough. Oddly not so rough on the personal side. Mostly work stuff. I got promoted effective yesterday. I think I mentioned it in my previous post but I went from being an Associate Application Developer to Application Developer. (I lost my training wheels!) Anyway this week I was on call and it was a release weekend. Maybe I’m just stressing myself out with tickets but a lot of tickets came out of the release, thankfully I was able to ping a Sr Dev and he let me know that I didn’t need to worry about the tickets (most of them) and that I could just close them out.
On the other side of things I had a job fail on Monday. I read the instructions which were a bit complicated (more so than what is normally asked of on call). I didn’t know I could access the logs and so I blindly restarted. That one failed too so the instructions mentioned letting it run on its scheduled run. Tuesday starts and I didn’t get anything overnight so I thought ok well this job ran successfully. Wednesday I get a message from my supervisor to look into the job that failed on Monday ok sure, I thought everything was ok but apparently I was wrong. I see an email also from someone else who oversees some operations worrying about the job and the backlog it is generating. Not good. I ask a Sr Dev (the same one mentioned above) and he connects me with the team I needed to talk to about it and they look and find an error in the logs and reach out to a support team. They included screenshots which informed me of how they got the information they found and some dots connected–so I learned a lot from it. I know how to look for jobs that fail and their logs. (I don’t always have access to do this however.) So we don’t hear back from the support team’s contact we had. I submit a ticket Friday morning after hearing some more backlash from that overseer person. I get a response immediately. Kinda difficult being the middle person.
“Why isn’t this being taken care of?” Well we (not us in particular but our company) upgraded some software and I don’t have access to fix the problem and neither does the team that works on the application because it’s production and it’s making changes to the server and we don’t have that access. No I could have reached out on Tuesday to the Sr Dev and this would’ve occurred a day earlier. Maybe gotten it resolved Tuesday or Wednesday. Had I not had the misconception about failed jobs backing up and holding future executions. I really need to get better at communicating. I always feel such a great amount of guilt for bothering people with anything. When I communicate more though I have a little bit less inhibition around it until I have an unfavorable social interaction. Anyway once we got everything resolved it felt good.
The next day though–Saturday for those who followed the timeline here and are keeping score–I had to get on and sort through all the backlog. I didn’t realize this was a thing–running through the held jobs. But why else would the person overseeing things be upset? They explained that there would be a purge for these jobs soon–the ones held. I needed to clear it by noon the next day Sunday. I’m like ok I’ll submit these jobs.
Oddly I had jobs fail here too. I checked the logs. It didn’t make sense. Resubmit. It worked. I got through all of the backlog. Didn’t have to scramble for a Subject Matter Expert(SME). I got a couple tickets I didn’t know how to handle and asked my expert (Sr Dev) and he let me know that I didn’t need to worry about these tickets. I closed them.
Today two more tickets came in, no idea on either. Sr Dev isn’t around so I’ll ask him tomorrow. My day off. Oh well.