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Showing posts with label disaster recovery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disaster recovery. Show all posts

Friday, March 28, 2025

Snapshot of My Work

Today, I am a Senior Technical Writer. My employer needed Disaster Recovery Documentation and on this day, in 2016, I started this job! I have been in this role for 3287 days (9 years). I am now 9 years beyond my Job Search 2016!

When I come to work, I log into my laptop which is connected to 3 monitors. If I open the lid of my laptop, I can actually use that screen as well. The first task I complete is to open a DOS batch file, located in the C:\RH folder which includes the commands necessary to back up my main RoboHelp DR-Doc project to the S:\Technical Documentation\_Storage folder, where my backups are stored in a folder structure by Year -> Month -> Day, which I prune in December. 

The DOS batch file copies all of the Microsoft Word templates in my C:\Users\prhanson\Desktop\Templates in the RH folder. 

I also store other projects in the C:\RH folder:

"C:\RH\20240830-MappingWordStyles"
"C:\RH\Dr-Doc"
"C:\RH\Dr-Doc-20250128"
"C:\RH\DR-Doc-20250303"
"C:\RH\DR-Doc-20250324"
"C:\RH\ESC"
"C:\RH\MappingWordStyles" 

When I select the folders in the C:\RH folder and then right-click to view Properties, this is my result:


Monday, November 13, 2023

Old Dog Meets a New Word and is Better for Expanding

Typically, when I see a mistake in someone else's writing, it is a typo or using "its" when the writer meant "it's" in their sentence. Such mistakes are also single offenders. However, this morning, on a Monday, I saw this article - The 25 worst cover songs of all time, ranked -- Artists like Madonna, Britney Spears, and David Bowie are among the big names who've turned beloved classics into mangled monstrosities -- By Stephen Thomas Erlewine--Published-Wednesday 8:00AM.Not only did I see a typo, but I also increased my vocabulary by one word. I used italics to indicate the error and bold to indicate the new word that I added to my vocabulary.:

Whatever the reason for the failings by these artists, there’s no disputing that the original songs remain beloved, which is why brutally bad updates can be so difficult to swallow. This list of the 25 worst cover songs, like our look at the 25 best cover songs of all time, doesn’t pretend be comprehensive. Still, as we surveyed the last five decades of pop and rock music, we’ve done our best to corral the truly awful covers and order them in a way that metes out some semblance of order, if not justice.

Notice that the Published date is "Wednesday" which I presume is 11-08-2023. Today is Monday, 11-13-2023, which means the following typos have existed for 5 days and either no one has informed the author. The first mistake is that "doesn't pretend be comprehensive" is missing the word "to" in the sentence. The sentence should be: "doesn't pretend to be comprehensive." The word I added to my vocabulary is mete, which I initially believed was a typo. However, mete is a word and this is the definition I found through the Internet:

to give out by measure : dole out. She realized the stern retribution which justice metes to the murderer.
Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mete

I now feel like I have learned today - can I go home now? [GRIN]

I do not want to go home. I am re-linking shell Word files for the P4 applications in our CMDB in my RoboHelp 2015 project for the Disaster Recovery documentation. Yes, MRDR--Mister Disaster Recovery Documentation (tm) is still working with RoboHelp 2015, not RoboHelp 2022. Perhaps that would be worth a blog post to freeze this moment at work?

Friday, July 14, 2023

Zipping files with 7z.exe

I continue to work on the Disaster Recovery documentation at work. For future reference, this is the DOS batch file I run each morning to back up my RoboHelp projects that reside in my c:\rh folder. I reduced the font size to avoid ugly line breaks - you are welcome! <grin>
cd\
c:
cd rh
REM | BROKEN COMMAND: for /d %%X in (*) do "I:\7-Zip-Command-Line\7za.exe" a "%%X.zip" "%%X\" -mx=5
REM | BROKEN Command: for /d %%X in (*) do "f:\7-Zip-Command-Line\7za.exe" a "%%X.zip" "%%X\" -mx=5
REM | BROKEN Command below this line:
REM | for /d %X in (*) do "c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a "%X.zip" "%X\"
for /d %%X in (*) do "c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a "%%X.zip" "%%X\" -mx=5 –tzip
SET %Today%=%Date:~10,4%_%Date:~4,2%_%Date:~7,2%
ren dr-doc.zip %TODAY%_H-rh-dr-doc_Dr-doc.zip
md "s:\technical documentation\_storage\2023\%TODAY%"
move *.zip "s:\technical documentation\_storage\2023\%TODAY%"
cd\
c:
cd rh-2022
REM | BROKEN Command: for /d %%X in (*) do "f:\7-Zip-Command-Line\7za.exe" a "%%X.zip" "%%X\" -mx=5
REM | UNBROKEN Command below this line:
for /d %%X in (*) do "c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a "%%X.zip" "%%X\" -mx=5 –tzip
ren dr-doc_rh2022.zip %TODAY%_dr-doc_rh2022.zip
move *.zip "s:\technical documentation\_storage\2023\%TODAY%"
pause
md "s:\technical documentation\_storage\2023\%TODAY%\Templates"
cd\
c:
xcopy c:\Users\prhanson\Desktop\Templates\*.* /s "s:\technical documentation\_storage\2023\%TODAY%\Templates"


There was a period in time where my DOS batch file was not functioning correctly so I used the following resource to correct it:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34602813/zipping-files-with-7z-exe - Zipping files with 7z.exe

Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Interesting


As Kuali engineers, we learn from and teach each other, we practice transparency and empathy, and we delight in delivering value to our customers.

We work remotely, and have for years. Distributed work is in our bones, with a history of institutions working across state lines on open-source software for more than ten years. Our employees each work in the environment where they’re happiest, from Pennsylvania to Hawaii. We work consciously to create a collaborative and healthy remote work culture and we travel to meet in person a few times each year.

Everyone should love their work.

Kuali has been voted a

for 5 years in a row by the Salt Lake Tribune. We also made

for 2020. Not too shabby.

At Kuali, we are committed to providing a welcoming environment where people of all races, gender identities, gender expressions, sexual orientations, physical abilities, physical appearances, socioeconomic backgrounds, life experiences, nationalities, ages, marital status, veteran status, military service eligibility, religions, and beliefs are included, valued and heard. Our belief is that a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion strengthens us as humans, as teams and as a company.

Requirements

Who are you?

We’re looking for curious, enthusiastic, empathetic engineers to solve problems, execute on ideas, advocate for the customer, and contribute to a team culture built on trust and mutual respect. As a Site Reliability Engineer here, you’ll have a significant impact on what we do and how we do it. You will enable our customers to have a delightful experience using our software by developing infrastructure as code that ensures a secure and reliable foundation for our products. You will empower your fellow engineers through the creation of self-service tools for code and infrastructure deployments, day-to-day operations, and incident response.

As a Site Reliability Engineer you will have the opportunity to influence major decisions from how our cloud-based infrastructure is architected, to what modern frameworks and tooling are used, to how our CI/CD will operate. You will support a small set of product teams with unique needs and requirements. This will entail reimaging, renovating, replacing, and retiring systems and processes to better enable and support these teams.

Our company builds and supports systems using Java, Node, TypeScript, React, and Elixir hosted in AWS. We believe that great engineers can always learn new tools. Above any specific tech stack, we’re looking for versatile developers — those who know when to think big and when to act small, and who are comfortable in both greenfield and refactoring projects.

We believe the best products are created by teams who represent a broad range of ideas and perspectives. We value employees with diverse backgrounds and experiences.

You...

  • Have 3+ years experience building cloud infrastructure for web applications using object-oriented, functional, or domain-specific programming languages, preferably on Amazon Web Services.
  • Understand how to build solutions with an agile approach. You’re excited to collaborate closely with Development Managers and Application Engineers to tailor solutions suited to application and organizational requirements, assess risk to properly mitigate the impact of releasing changes.
  • Have a passion for automating secure and scalable systems to meet requirements such as availability, cost-performance, and observability.
  • Have experience with CI/CD pipelines to orchestrate containerized web applications and their backend services.
  • Have experience reviewing code to both give and receive constructive feedback.

We’d be delighted if you bring experience with:

  • One or more of these technologies: Python, PowerShell, AWS CDK, Kubernetes, MySQL, MongoDB.
  • Incremental refactoring of legacy Linux systems into managed services.
  • Implementing continuous compliance of data and vulnerability management policies, including automation of reporting for SOC2 Type 2 audits.
  • Building aggregated views of applications and infrastructure performance data in an APM tool like New Relic.

Other things you should know:

  • This position involves an on-call rotation and some off-hours maintenance. We recognize the impact of these responsibilities on employees and are committed to minimizing it as much as possible. If on-call responsibilities or maintenance has a significant off-hours impact, you will be invited to offset that time during a normal work week. Protecting work life balance is a priority for our company.
  • This team is (and has always been) fully remote. You’d be expected to have a suitable home working environment or alternative. We try to get together in person as a team or company 1-3 times a year.

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and underrepresented minorities are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Kuali, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this role.

Benefits

  • Top-of-the-line equipment of your choice to get your job done
  • A truly exceptional benefits package including full premium coverage for employee and dependent medical and dental care
  • 401(k) matching
  • Employee stock options
  • Paid Maternity/Parental leave
  • All the paid time off you need (just work it out with your manager)
  • Allowance for continuing education, conferences, and/or training
  • Space to work on self-driven projects during quarterly “hack weeks”
  • Employee resource groups and community events

Friday, August 19, 2022

The Essence of What I Want to Do

While I am not qualified for the job below - I am not a programmer - I love the first 8 words in the line below.
Developing software to automate the manual work required to keep a SaaS offering highly available, scalable, and resilient to the vagaries of the Internet and frequent deploys.

It is the the requirement that I love to see and, truly, even though I do not consider myself a programmer, I do see value in using snippets, variables, DOS batch files, and Word macros as a means to automate manual work. That is the motivation behind writing and updating my Single Source Rant page. I want to un-complicate all aspects of the work I do with Disaster Recovery Documentation and Knowledge Management documentation - work smarter, not harder. It's why being MRDR [(Mister Disaster Recovery Documentation tm)] is who I am after 2334 days (6 years, 4 months, 3 weeks) in my current role. If my life goes according to my plan, I have worked 0.3195071868583162 or, rounded to the nearest 10th, 31.9 % of the 20 years I want to work here. Just to state it again, my plan is to work until Friday, March 28, 2036. I will be 66 years, 3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days old on that day and, according to my plan, I will work 115 days (3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days) past my 65th birthday in order to reach 20 years here. That's my plan anyways. 

All that aside, this is the awesome job that I won't apply for.


Site Reliability Engineer (MasteryConnect)

US-Remote /
Engineering /
Full-time
At Instructure, we believe in the power of people to grow and succeed throughout their lives. Our goal is to amplify that power by creating intuitive products that simplify learning and personal development, facilitate meaningful relationships, and inspire people to go further in their educations and careers. We do this by giving smart, creative, passionate people opportunities to create awesome products and tools.

By focusing on our values — ownership, openness, simplicity, equality, and relationships — and using a modern stack that includes AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Vault, Terraform, Ruby, and Go, we are pushing the boundaries of managing services at scale.

What you will be doing:

    • Partnering with engineering teams to automate & optimize service availability, scalability, performance, monitoring, and alerting.
    • Educating & empowering software engineers to think operationally when designing services and operate what they build.
    • Writing code to simplify DevOps tasks and allow engineers to deploy and debug their own code in production.
    • Developing software to automate the manual work required to keep a SaaS offering highly available, scalable, and resilient to the vagaries of the Internet and frequent deploys.
    • Creating and maintaining methodologies of iteratively deploying Instructure’s cloud-based architecture.
    • Building resilient and self-scaling systems so that you and the team can sleep through the night.

What we look for:

    • A desire for ownership and love for problem-solving.
    • Experience with Amazon Web Services.
    • Programming experience in at least one modern programming language (for example, Ruby, Go, Python, or Node.
    • Experience with Containers; Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
    • Understanding of configuration management, automation, and infrastructure-as-code tools (for example, Ansible, Terraform, Salt, or Puppet).Code pipelines exposure - Git, Jenkins, Harness, etc.
    • Open, team-oriented, with a strong desire to learn.

Get in on all the awesome of Instructure:

    • Competitive salary, equity and 401k. 
    • Medical, dental, disability, and life insurance. 
    • HSA program, vision, voluntary life, and AD&D. 
    • Tuition reimbursement.
    • Paid time off, 10 paid holidays, and flexible work schedules. 
    • Gym club reimbursements and rewards-based fitness tracking.
We’ve always believed in hiring the most awesome people and treating them right. We know that the more diverse we are, the more diverse our ideas will be and when we openly welcome those ideas, our environment is better and our business is stronger..

 At Instructure we participate in E-Verify and yes, in case you didn't catch it from the above, we are an Equal Opportunity Employer.

All Instructure employees are required to successfully pass a background check upon being hired.

Wednesday, May 11, 2022

Brief Thoughts about Silos



Know Your Audience

Peet1 asked a question and Derrick Qian | Microsoft Community Support Specialist tried to answer the question. Derrick Qian | Microsoft Community Support Specialist, but it didn't go especially well as you can read here https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/musicandvideo/forum/all/file-explorer/5f4ee4ab-5336-4480-82e8-924dc6bb98e5 - File Explorer. What Peet1 wrote exemplifies the question that has no answer in the technical writing community: How do you write content that authentically helps your audience?


Hi Derrick. Thanks for your reply and thank you VERY much for the effort you made to try and help me. It takes time and patience to provide the information you have provided. Thank You. What advanced technical people like you do not understand, is that there are millions of people, like me, who do not have a clue what you are talking about. For example:

"1. Manual: 

First create a Desktop.ini file in the folder that needs to be changed, for example:

[.ShellClassInfo]

ConfirmFileOp=0

InfoTip=my folder

IconIndex=0

IconFile=MyFolder.ico

explain:

parameter ConfirmFileOp s........................"

No-one out there, unless they are computer technically trained, knows what this means. Create Desktop.ini: What programme is used to do this? Notepad perhaps? It doesn't say, so I don't know. Does "MyFolder" refer to the folder I'm in? I have too many questions.


Derrick's answer was helpful to me but not to Peet1. How does Derrick write content that serves BOTH Peet1 and me in a technical support forum?

My manager and I discussed something similar to this yesterday. We were talking about how the SME  who writes the disaster recovery documentation for their system is writing for themselves and how there is really no way to standardize whether their content is useful to someone else until the following (which I am fleshing out after contemplating the discussion overnight): 

  • There is a disaster and System ABBA has to be restored
  • The SME for System ABBA is unavailable
  • The SME for System ASIA is available and has technical expertise and knowledge but not for System ABBA. However, given the circumstances, the SME for System ASIA is going to attempt to use the documentation that the SME for System ABBA wrote.
    • If the SME for System ASIA uses the documentation that the SME for System ABBA wrote and the SME for System ASIA is able to restore System ABBA, 
    • then documentation = useful. 
    • Else, the SME for System ASIA uses the documentation that the SME for System ABBA wrote and the SME for System ASIA is unable to restore System ABBA, the documentation is not useful.
I also said that I hope we never have a disaster when we have to find out!

Friday, March 25, 2022

Another SRE Job - at Pearson?!?

This must be the week for SRE jobs. This one is at Pearson, where I worked from 5-30-2011 --> 1-26-2016 1702 days (4 years, 7 months, 3 weeks, 6 days). As I mentioned the other day, no, I'm not qualified for this role so no, I'm not going to apply.

However, I do have the following simple questions:

  • what is the standard for including hyperlinks as actual hyperlinks in a job ad - should they be an active hyperlink, as designated below in red or not an active hyperlink, as designated below in purple?
  • I wish there was a standard...
  • what does #LI-POST mean, as designated below in green.


I don't have an answer to either question and it doesn't matter as I am not even applying for what might be an awesome job.


Site Reliability Engineer Iowa City, Iowa 

We are the world’s learning company with more than 24,000 employees operating in 70 countries. We combine world-class educational content and assessment,powered by services and technology, to enable more effective teaching and personalized learning at scale. We believe that wherever learning flourishes so do people.

The Cloud Infrastructure Services team is seeking candidates for a Site Reliability Engineer. SRE’s play an integral role ensuring that our customers have a highly available and reliable platform. The role supports the deployment and customization of our ERP Platform. As a Site Reliability engineer, you will scale systems sustainably through mechanisms like automation, and evolve systems by pushing for changes that improve reliability and velocity.

As an SRE, you will:

  • Design scalable, robust, secure systems using cloud architecture

  • Build automation using industry tools (like Jenkins, Ansible, etc.) to deploy hundreds of different services

  • Ensure a high degree of availability across all of our service offerings.

  • Identify bottlenecks and problems throughout the infrastructure.

  • Drive projects/technical initiatives and architectural/technical service improvements .

  • Build automation to scale infrastructure based on forecasted demand.

  • Develop custom tools as necessary.

  • Document system design and procedures.

  • Maintain applications and services once they are live by measuring and monitoring availability, latency and overall system health.

  • Practice sustainable incident response and postmortems.

  • Partner and lead internal and external technology resources in solving complex business needs

  • Participate in an on-call rotation.

  • Provide architectural recommendations

  • Ensure SLA obligations are met.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

  • 4+ years' hands on experience managing, maintaining, and automating infrastructure in AWS.

  • 4+ years' hands on experience managing and maintaining Linux systems.

  • BS degree in Computer Science or related technical field involving systems engineering (e.g., physics or mathematics), or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Advanced problem-solving experience involving leading teams in identifying, researching, and coordinating the resources necessary to effectively troubleshoot/diagnose complex project issues; prior success extracting/translating findings into alternatives/solutions; and identifying risks/impacts and schedule adjustments to facilitate management decision-making.

  • Hands on Experience with Oracle Database and Middleware Infrastructure.

  • Good understanding of standard networking protocols and components such as: HTTP, DNS, TCP/IP, ICMP, the OSI Model, Subnetting and Load Balancing.

  • Fluent in at least one scripting language, Python experience highly preferred.

  • Strong experience using logging and monitoring tools (ie: Splunk, Cloudwatch, NewRelic)

  • Experience with Ansible or other configuration management systems.

  • Strong familiarity with software configuration management systems and/or source code version control systems

  • Excellent English communication skills

The anticipated starting salary range for Colorado-based individuals expressing interest in this position is $100,000.00-$107,000.00. This position is eligible to participate in an annual incentive program.

Benefits available to eligible employees can be seen at: https://pearsonbenefitsus.com/

Learning is the most powerful force for change in the world. More than 20,000 Pearson employees deliver our products and services in nearly 200 countries, all working towards a common purpose – to help everyone achieve their potential through learning. We do that by providing high quality, digital content and learning experiences, as well as assessments and qualifications that help people build their skills and grow with the world around them. We are the world’s leading learning company. Learn more at pearsonplc.com.

Pearson believes that wherever learning flourishes, so do people. We are committed to being an anti-racist company in everything we do. We value the power of an inclusive culture and a strong sense of belonging. We promote a culture where differences are embraced, opportunities are accessible, consideration and respect are the norm, and all individuals are supported in reaching their full potential. Through our talent, we believe that diversity, equity, and inclusion make us a more innovative and vibrant place to work. People are at the center, and we are committed to a sustainable environment and workplace where talent can learn, grow, and thrive.  

To learn more about Pearson’s commitment to a diverse and inclusive workforce, please click here:  http://www.pearson.com/careers/diversity-and-inclusion.html

Pearson is an Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer and a member of E-Verify. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. All employment is decided based on qualifications, merit, and business need. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other group protected by law.

Job: TECHNOLOGY

Organization: Corporate Strategy & Technology

Schedule: FULL_TIME

Req ID: 2109432


Thursday, March 24, 2022

SRE is Intriguing

As my interest in Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) evolves, I find myself wondering what life would have been like if I had, in the past, tranistioned to being a Site Reliability Engineer. No, I'm definitely not qualified for the position below!

Site Reliability Engineer, Trello

SRE | New York, United States | Remote Americas | Full Time

Apply for this job

Atlassian can hire people in any country where we have a legal entity, assuming candidates have eligible working rights and a sufficient timezone overlap with their team. As our offices re-open, Atlassians can choose to work remotely or return to an office, unless it’s necessary for the role to be performed in the office. Interviews and onboarding are conducted virtually, a part of being a distributed-first company.

As a Site Reliability Engineer at Trello, you’ll work on keeping everything running efficiently as we scale our infrastructure to support our more than 90 million Trello users while maintaining our 99.99% uptime target. The code you write and deploy into production will directly contribute to the scalability and resilience of Trello, and you will directly improve our user’s experience with the product.

Key Responsibilities:

  • Comfortable owning the infrastructure and pragmatically solving problems dealing with complex systems.
  • Working with developers to support the latest features that we have in development, like Power-Ups, data pipeline improvements, and scalable microservices.
  • Contributing your insights across the team to help us improve or re-architect existing systems for scale and extensibility.
  • Contributing to new and existing compliance initiatives.

On your first day, you will have expertise in:

  • Engineering microservices and tools across one or more programming languages (e.g. Go, Python).
  • Automation and Infrastructure-as-Code projects and tooling (e.g. Ansible, Puppet, Terraform).
  • Building and maintaining a continuous integration and delivery pipeline (e.g. Bamboo, Bitbucket Pipelines, Github Actions).
  • Observability tools and methodology (e.g. logging, metrics, tracing) for highly available web services.
  • Designing and delivering AWS cloud-native infrastructure solutions.
  • Incident response and management in on-call rotation.
  • Focus on operational maturity and reliability with microservices.

It's great, but not required to have:

  • Experience building and managing large scale, high impact systems on AWS or other cloud infrastructure.
  • Experience with large MongoDB cluster deployments.

More about our benefits

Whether you work in an office or a distributed team, Atlassian is highly collaborative and yes, fun! To support you at work (and play) we offer some fantastic perks: ample time off to relax and recharge, flexible working options, five paid volunteer days a year for your favourite cause, an annual allowance to support your learning & growth, unique ShipIt days, a company paid trip after five years and lots more.

More about Atlassian

Creating software that empowers everyone from small startups to the who’s who of tech is why we’re here. We build tools like Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello to help teams across the world become more nimble, creative, and aligned—collaboration is the heart of every product we dream of at Atlassian. From Amsterdam and Austin, to Sydney and San Francisco, we’re looking for people who want to write the future and who believe that we can accomplish so much more together than apart. At Atlassian, we’re committed to an environment where everyone has the autonomy and freedom to thrive, as well as the support of like-minded colleagues who are motivated by a common goal to: Unleash the potential of every team.


Tuesday, March 15, 2022

My Perspective about a Recent Pseudo Disaster

On Sunday, 3-13-2022, Alex and I swapped vehicles. He is driving the Ford F-150 until we drive to Des Moines on 3-26 to help him move out of his apartment and into a townhouse. I didn't think about adding his Nissan Rogue to my parking permit account so when I was greeted with this parking ticket after work. I added his vehicle to my parking permit account and yes, I definitely appealed the ticket! 

Not to dwell upon the parking ticket for an extensive number of words, but I couldn't help but think about how receiving this parking ticket relates to disaster recovery preparedness and completing disaster recovery documentation for a system that provides a service. Bear with me as this is a twisted relationship, but it does exist and the "twistiness" of the relationship doesn't mean it isn't worth exploring. To the parking permit office, seeing Alex's car in a parking lot and that car not having a parking permit triggered an event. In my case, because I wasn't pro-active and didn't think about preparing to swap vehicles until 3-25, a pseudo-disaster happened due to not being prepared. I had to react to the disaster and act in response to it. In a disaster recovery situation where restore instructions for a system do not exist when the disaster happens, the system owner may not be able to resolve their system's outage as easily as how easily I was able to restore the "disaster" of not pro-actively entering Alex's vehicle to my parking permit account. 

Of course, no, receiving a parking ticket yesterday is not even close in the degree of awfulness to an actual disaster.

However, as I often do, I perceive a change in how I think compared to how I thought prior to starting at the University of Iowa. For the first 7717 days of my career, I worked at various companies as a technical writer at various software companies. In summary, my primary work function at each of my previous employers was to document software systems. I did the math and this next phase of my career is only 2178 days (5 years, 11 months, 2 weeks, 1 day) old. That's 22.011116725619% of my entire career, but there's a difference in the way I think now in this phase of my career as a technical writer. My primary work is to assemble disaster recovery documentation and while these two phases of my career have differences - I'd be foolish to claim that there is zero overlap between the "document software systems" phase of my career and the "disaster recovery documentation" phase of my career - I will say that receiving a parking ticket made me think about the event in a way I would not have ever thought about prior to 3-28-2016. I acknowledge the difference in the way I see the world around me since I began working on disaster recovery documentation. 

 

Thursday, December 2, 2021

Adding to the List

Another course I should take on LinkedIn Learning is this one: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/cism-cert-prep-2-information-risk-management/disaster-recovery-planning. I copied & pasted the section of the course that attracted my attention.


Disaster recovery planning

“- [Instructor] Business continuity programs are designed to keep a business up and running in the face of a disaster. But unfortunately, they don't always work. Sometimes continuity controls fail or the sheer magnitude of a disaster overwhelms the organization's capacity to continue operations. That's where disaster recovery begins. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity activities, designed to restore a business to normal operations as quickly as possible following a disruption. The disaster recovery plan may include immediate measures that get operations up and running again temporarily. But the disaster recovery effort is not finished until the organization is completely back to normal operations. The initial response following an emergency disruption is designed to contain the damage to the organization and recover whatever capacity may be immediately restored. The activities during this initial response will vary widely depending upon the nature of the disaster and…

Backups

“- [Instructor] Backups are perhaps the most important component of any disaster recovery plan. Most businesses today are built around data. Whether it's proprietary designs, confidential customer lists, or information databases, data drives business. For many organizations, the complete loss of their data would be a disaster of tremendous proportions. Backups provide organizations with a fail-safe way to recover their data in the event of a technology failure, human error, natural disaster, or other circumstances that result in data's accidental or intentional deletion or modification. Backups are a crucial safety net for data-driven businesses. Organizations may back up their data in many different ways. Traditionally, organizations wrote their backups to tape, and this is still a very common practice today. However, tapes are unwieldy to manage, and modern backup approaches often use alternative storage that has become much less expensive over the past few years. For example, some…

Validating backups

“- [Instructor] Backups play a crucial role in an organization's disaster recovery strategy. But it's surprising how often organizations fail to properly test those backups to verify that they were completed properly and that they're ensuring the continued availability of critical business information in the event of a disaster. One of the most important data protection actions that you can take is regularly verifying your backups to ensure that they're functioning properly. There are several different types of backup tests that you should perform. First, all modern backup software has built-in verification mechanisms. You can use these mechanisms to validate that a backup was successful immediately after creating the backup. This is just the bare bones of backup verification because you are relying upon the software that performed the backup to tell you that it worked properly. However, it's amazing how many organizations have this verification feature turned off, either because they…

Disaster recovery sites

“- [Narrator] During a disaster organizations may need to shift their computing functions from their primary data center to alternate facility design to carry the load when their primary site is unavailable or nonfunctioning. Disaster Recovery Sites, are alternate processing facilities especially design for this purpose. Most of the time they sit idol, waiting to step in when an emergency situation arises. There're three main types of alternate processing facilities: Hot Sites. Cold Sites. And Warm sites. Hot sites are the premier form of disaster recover facility. They are fully operational data centers that have all of the equipment and data required to handle operations ready to run. Technology staff can active the Hot Sites at a moment's noticed and in many cases, the Hot site will actually activate itself, if the primary site fails. This provides an unparalleled level of redundancy, but it also comes at great expense. The costs of building and maintaining a Hot Site are typically…

Testing BC/DR plans

“- [Instructor] Disaster recovery plans are critical to ensuring the continuity of business operations. As with any security control, disaster recovery plans should be tested to ensure that the plan functions properly and will be ready to restore business operations in the event of a disruption. Each test of a disaster recovery plan has two goals. First, it validates that the plan functions correctly and that disaster recovery technology will work in the event of an actual disaster. Second, the disaster recovery test provides an opportunity to identify necessary updates to the plan due to technology or business process changes. Let's talk about five types of disaster recovery testing. Read-throughs, walk-throughs, simulations, parallel tests, and full interruption tests. Read-throughs are the simplest form of disaster recovery testing. They're also known as checklist reviews. In this approach, disaster recovery staff distribute copies of the current plan to all personnel involved in…


Tuesday, November 9, 2021

Preparing for the Big Meeting at 9 AM Today!!!

The recent Astroworld Festival tragedy - 8 fans were killed - is absolutely awful and I feel awful for the 8 families who are facing the reality that they have experienced a terrible loss. Maybe they watched their loved one leave. Maybe they didn't say any words to their loved one, as I've done before when Alex has gone to a concert without me. Whatever the case, it's absolutely awful.

Matt Walsh talked about it yesterday Music Festival Turns Deadly.

CNN noted that the Operations plan for Astroworld Festival did not include contingency for surging crowd and that's what piqued my interest. I work on disaster recovery documentation which is, in a way, an operations play for a disaster that destroys UIHC IT systems. It brings to mind the discussions I've had with various SMEs about the scenario for a disaster and what is needed in disaster recovery documentation. I recall one discussion with a SME vividly. He talked about how in one of his classes as he was earning his MBA, his professor talked about how he was involved in the disaster recovery plan for a company on 9/11/2001. The SME told me that this professor said the first step was to get the backup tapes from, yes, one of the twin towers that had fallen that day.

How do you plan for that? How do you plan for the unthinkable? "If an airplane flies into the twin towers, a second backup tape is located in [some other location]." From the beginning of that company's existence through the moment that the plane struck the twin tower, including that sentence would be viewed as extra and irrelevant. In fact, if I were editing that disaster recovery plan, I would have easily removed that sentence.

But that's the thing about the work I do on a daily basis. It's making a prediction about the future.

Today, I have a meeting with an auditor. Prior to starting in my current job, an auditor would "ding" my employer about how their disaster recovery plan was not centralized, which has become the central theme of my daily work. Not today, but in the future, I want to incorporate the above CNN article into any future PowerPoint presentations I prepare for any future meetings about my disaster recovery documentation.

Editor's Note: This is The Matt Walsh Show episode that is referenced in the link above. It was a good episode and worth embedding.

Thursday, October 28, 2021

This Was Expected

I won't be posting any additional posts about this opening in my department. Instead, it is a topic I have been discerning about in my private journal since February 2021, when an announcement was made during a department meeting that this position was going to be posted in the future. I need to answer this question: "What do I do with this opening in my department?"

IT Manager – Disaster Recovery

📁
IT Professionals
21005133

University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics department of Health Care Information Systems is seeking an IT Manager.  The IT Manager will direct the development and operational management of disaster recovery requirements for the UI Health Care IT department.  UI Health Care IT spans ambulatory care, critical care, periop services, administrative and research environments.  Organize and facilitation of disaster simulations involving all levels of UI Health Care and UI staff.  Direct manage technical staff to deliver critical information system services to all levels of UI Health Care faculty, staff and customers.  Direct the recruitment, performance and career development activities of responsible staff. Closely partner with and collaborate with leaders across UI Health Care departments and the academic enterprise, to support organizational initiatives.  

Occasional off-hours and weekend work may be required along with sharing in a 24x7 on-call support rotation.

Health Care Information Systems (HCIS): Provides and supports information and communication systems and technology that facilitate quality patient care, progressive medical education, and innovative research.

HCIS services University of Iowa Health Care by providing comprehensive, high level support for patient care delivery, internal and external communication, technology innovation, medical education, and research. Creating and maintaining a positive, productive, and rewarding environment for information technology and communication staff

Pay Grade:  https://hr.uiowa.edu/pay/pay-plans/professional-and-scientific-pay-structure-b
Salary: 5B
University of Iowa offers a generous benefits package, including 24 days paid vacation per year to start and paid sick leave.  Complete information regarding the full benefits package may be viewed at https://hr.uiowa.edu/benefits
Percent of Time:  100%
Location: 3281 Ridgeway Dr, Coralville, IA  52241
Staff Type: Professional & Scientific
Type of Position: Regular 
 

Education Required

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or MIS or an equivalent combination of education and related healthcare technology experience and technical certifications.

Required Qualifications

•    Experience (typically 5-7 years) defining, planning and guiding the installation of IT services involving multi-disciplinary teams in a diverse enterprise environment, with considerable (2-4 years) administrative and management experience including staff management activities.
•    Extensive knowledge of technology spaces, including hardware, networking, storage systems, security, application and server/client services.
•    Extremely organized, highly motivated self-starter with excellent attention to detail and excellent multi-tasking skills.  Along with exceptional verbal, written communication, and documentation skills; ability to articulate ideas to both technical and non-technical audience.
•    Extensive knowledge of technology trends and demonstrated experience applying innovative technology solutions to business and healthcare problems.
•    Experience developing initiatives to drive collaborative and service orientation skills throughout organization.
•    Demonstrated job-related experience with a commitment to diversity in the work/academic environment.
•    Driver's License and ability to meet the University of Iowa Fleet Services program rules and regulations, due to the required ability to drive University vehicles.

Desirable Qualifications: 

•    Experience with operationalizing disaster recovery preparations and business continuity planning.
•    Experience in the development of standards and policies across functional specialties.
•    Experience with analysis, planning, estimating and scheduling of high-risk, high-impact IT projects.  
•    Experience with all aspects of talent management and professional development techniques.
•    Experience with change management, continuous improvement initiatives, ITIL, LEAN and project management

In order to be considered, applicants must upload a resume (under submission relevant materials) that clearly addresses how they meet the listed required and desired qualifications of this position.  A cover letter is desired as part of the application process. Job openings are posted for a minimum of 14 calendar days. This job may be removed from posting and filled any time after the minimum posting period has ended.

Successful candidates will be subject to a criminal background and credential check. This position is not eligible for University sponsorship for employment authorization.

Additional Information
Compensation
Contact Information

Thursday, October 21, 2021

Spells Out the Unspoken

What I like the most about this job ad is this text:

You will also have the opportunity to act as a “user” for Zoomin’s own products. In this capacity, you will be expected to act as a beta-tester ,design partner and customer advocate for Zoomin

In my career as a Technical Writer, dating back to my first day at NDP in Cedar Rapids, "acting" as a "user" for the product I was documenting has always been part of the job, at NDP, at Jordan Systems, at Quintrex, at the Unnamed Hellhole in Southern Iowa, and at Pearson because, at each of those companies, if I didn't "act as a user," my work would have been useless for the target audience. 

At my current job, as a Senior Technical Writer working on both Disaster Recovery documentation and Knowledge Management, I am doing hardly any writing. For both of those projects, the SMEs write the documentation and I curate the content into a deliverable. After 5 1/2 years in this current role, I sometimes struggle with the lack of writing I do on a daily basis. I love my job - certainly, no, there's no way I will ever work in Tel Aviv...


Technical Writer

  • Tel Aviv

Description

A Technical Writer is an important position for any B2B software company, but all the more so for Zoomin, a company whose mission is to reinvent the enterprise technical content experience. 

As Technical Writer you will be expected to author high quality technical product content to help our customers get the most out of Zoomin. You will also have the opportunity to act as a “user” for Zoomin’s own products. In this capacity, you will be expected to act as a beta-tester ,design partner and customer advocate for Zoomin, across the entire range of technical documentation experiences (including the documentation portal and in-product help).

If you like communicating clearly in both written and verbal form, are passionate about technical documentation, and want to play an active role in the next generation of a product content experience, this job is for you!

Responsibilities

  • Become a domain expert in our products
  • Create, maintain and publish high quality, clear, technical content about our products
  • Help drive improvements in content, based on user feedback and analytics, to improve customer satisfaction and engagement
  • Act as a beta-customer and design-partner for Zoomin’s platform. Help design and improve new features and capabilities 
  • Be a passionate  Zoomin advocate when communicating with customers and prospects, and help in closing new sales and upsell opportunities

Requirements

Qualifications

 Please apply if you:

  • Are passionate about technical documentation and interested in making a big impact in this space
  • Have at least three years of experience writing high-quality technical documentation for software products in English
  • Able to write and speak in English at the level of a native speaker
  • Proven experience with DITA - an advantage

Thursday, September 23, 2021

Lots of Buzzwords that mean nothing to me

"Operationalize" is the word that screams out to me in the following snip from an email I received this AM that was advertising an online conference. I have no idea how I ended up on their marketing email list. I also have to say "operationalize"is one of those words that... I'm all for allowing language to be fluid and to add new words to the vocabulary human beings use. That said, I should willingly retire if any technical writing I do includes the "operationalize" term. Maybe, as an Easter egg, I'll add that word to the initial home page of my disaster recovery documentation, to see if anyone even notices...


Here are just a few of the sessions you won’t want to miss from Day 1 of BMC Exchange:

Solving the Service Paradox: Discover the impact intelligent automation can have on creating and deploying innovative services to meet employee experience and operations goals

Achieve ServiceOps with AIOps and AISM: Learn to improve DevOps processes with solutions that help predict change risks, support cross-functional collaboration to solve problems, and automatically recommend problem resolutions

Power DataOps with Application Workflow Orchestration: Operationalize complex workflows by accessing production-ready orchestration of cloud services with Python, the preferred programming language among data professionals

A Platform Approach to Enterprise Service Management, Observability, and Automation: See why delivering agility, customer centricity, and actionable insights requires not just teamwork but also a single, unified platform for your operational systems and data