At age 49, do you wallow in the agony of “I could have, I should have?

My friends.

If we take care of the important things in life.

If we are right with those we care about.

If we behave in line with our faith.

Our lives will not be cursed with the throbs of unfinished business.

Our words will always be sincere, our embraces tight.

We will never wallow in the agony of “I could have, I should have”.

We can sleep in a storm.

And when it's time, our goodbyes will be complete.

• Rabbi Albert Lewis 1975

50 years later

Maybe you’re feeling outcompeted by younger, more tech-savvy workers.

Maybe your reality didn’t meet your early career expectations.

Maybe it's time to go back to faith.

When we first started Flask Data, I did everything myself.?

During the first 3 months,? I wrote code, configured and hardened Linux servers, setup monitoring, and talked to potential customers.

And I did it without ChatGPT and Github Copilot.

Within 3 months, we had 3 paying customers.? I was getting tired of late nights.???

After a few incidents, my co-founder, Jenya, put her foot down and said:?

“I’m not allowing you to touch servers any more”.

We decided to create a DevOps function and get someone else to do it.? Not Danny.

A DevOps Systems Engineer is a professional who specializes in combining development (Dev) and operations (Ops) practices to streamline and automate the software development and deployment process. They are responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the infrastructure and tools that enable a DevOps culture within an organization.

This was a major step for us both technically and culturally.

A major step for me as a founder..

We started looking for a DevOps engineer who would report to my CTO.

By now, we had 20 customers, and over 3000 patients enrolled in customers’ clinical trials on our SaaS platform for collecting clinical data from patients and connected devices.

Finding an experienced DevOps engineer, with good communication skills and ability to fit in with the team under the leadership of our CTO was not easy.

5 years ago

We interviewed a candidate in her 50s - Lee-ann.

Lee-ann passed the interview with flying colors. ? She had worked for one of the big FAANG companies and lost her job in one of the periodic cutbacks.

She had a confident, happy personality and we were sure she would work well with our engineering and customer services teams.

?She was available to start immediately.

I ask for recommendations.

She said - “here you go”, and handed me a sheet of paper, with 1 handwritten line on it.

“She sleeps well in a storm”.

I asked - “what does that mean?”

Lee-ann shrugged and said - “I don’t know.? I guess it means I sleep well”.

We hired her.

Lee-ann proved to be rock-solid on Linux infrastructure.? She set up CI/CD and improved our backup and patching processes. We stopped paying attention.? Things just worked.? We continued to grow.

3 years later.?

It’s a Tuesday night, 230 in the morning. ? I’m woken up by an alert from our AWS monitoring systems.???

I leap out of bed and grab my phone from the nightstand.

I read the AWS status page - over 20,000 servers are down in AWS US EAST-1, our primary data center.

A power line to the AWS US EAST-1 data center in Virginia was cut by a tractor.? Storage services are down.? An unknown number of disks have been fried by the power surge.

We are working to restore services. ? Over 90% of the servers are still down. ? We expect to restore service to 95% of the servers by Sunday afternoon Eastern.

My first thought. Holy crap. We’re f-ked.

Major disaster.

I call Lee-ann. ? Her husband picks up.? “Lee-ann is sleeping”, hangs up and goes back to sleep himself.

So I slap some cold water on my face and start checking our services:

Clinical trial management servers.? Working fine.?

Data collection servers.? Working fine.

API services. All services are healthy.

The present

If you behave in line with your faith.

Your life will not be cursed with the throbs of unfinished business.

Your words will always be sincere, your embraces tight.

You will never wallow in the agony of “I could have, I should have”.

Your faith is your greatest strength