There were so many people everywhere in the holiday! We went to another city which is about 200 km from Shanghai and it took us 5 hours to get there and another 5 hours to come back. That’s crazy! So we decided to just stay at home for the rest of the 3 days to have some good relaxing and maybe have some fun near our community.
Then I thought why not use this big block of time to work on my home lab environment without interruption to refresh my memory on some old knowledge and also prepare for what might puzzle me in my work, including SCCM, Azure, Jenkins, Terraform, etc. So I made the plan to work on the lab each afternoon and have fun with the family in the morning and evening. Here is what I completed so far:
- Setting up SCCM so that I can test the migration from SCCM to Azure for some of the workloads, like Windows Updates, App deployment and maybe GPO management, etc.;
- Setting up Vsphere and created two hosts for redundancy to host a few VMs of both servers and windows workstations;
- Setting up Jenkins so that I can test the automation work, like server management and maybe resource management in my Azure tenant (Jenkins master is installed and up running but I am still working on the slaves/nodes configurations.)
- Terraform kick off where I have started the terraform training and created and managed instances inside my AWS tenant.
I thought it would be quick when I decided to do such work but it turned out to be quite time consuming as there are always some issues which I did not foresee or which happened because of my negligence and some of them took time for the troubleshooting and to get fixed. But these issues are valuable as they help me get a better understanding of the background of the issues and how they should work or work better from configuration perspective.
Time flies, especially when you are dedicated to something you enjoy doing. It’s always like this no matter it’s for life or work. And I think to get better at what we like to do, we are supposed to spend more time and efforts there. This is true to the work and the skills needed to do our work better. We need to work 8 hours each day and 5 days a week to get what needs to be done done with the knowledge and skills we already have, but we want to become better and climb higher in our career path and to do that, we need to find some extra time for that, either evenings or weekends or holidays. And the truth is the more professional we are, the more time and efforts it will take for us to advance, even a small step. So, I think we are supposed to spend as much time as we can on what we’d like to do, whether it’s doing physical exercise, building a good body shape, learning new skills or maybe just reading books to have a more systematic knowledge on certain subjects. And we need to be focused as the time and efforts we have can not guarantee we can get all the things we want completed with a good quality. We need to separate really important things from what can be skipped or just abandoned. These 3 days of the holiday is a good time spent not just because I enjoyed what I did with the real work but also because it helped to clear my understanding of time management and also life arrangements.