Overstressed

I have been a Solution Architect at AWS for just over 10 months now and during that time I have pushed myself to learn two skills at the same time.

First, AWS. Coming from a more traditional background, learning AWS and how things are architected in the cloud was an amazing challenge. I’m no expert by any means, but I’ve learned SO much over the last few months on cloud, cloud compute, different design patterns, and always planing for failure. I’ve always tried to architect my infrastructure in a highly available way, but with cloud options, you can do highly available so much more efficiently then anything I was able to build traditional due to lack of resources and the high cost of trying to implement these technologies myself. AWS allows you to really rethink high available architecture without breaking a bank and scaling global in a matter of minutes instead of days or weeks or even months.

Second, Pre-sales solutions architect. I come from a post sales background. I’ve worked with customers before, I’ve done white boarding before, and I’ve architected things for customers before but always in a post sales environment. They would get sold some gear and I would have to install it and then we would architect around how to get it to work correctly. There was always some transfer of knowledge that would happen, and I would try and reach back out to help them if I could. Pre-sales SA is different, and wrapping your head around all 100+ services and wanting really badly to always have a correct answer to every little detail is very overwhelming. I think this is the part I have had the most trouble with. I can learn the technologies, and as I use them more or see them in use more often then I feel more comfortable talking about these technologies and presenting these topics to people.

So what happened?

There is an internal process that is we all have to go through. This is suppose to help with building the pre-sales skills and see how we react during stressful presentations. The first time I went through this process, I scared myself to the point I froze for most of it. When I did it again, it was better but it wasn’t what it should be. We have a high bar at AWS and I was not meeting that bar. Over the next few months, I kept putting more pressure and stress on myself to try and reach this bar. It was so much stress, to the point that it was impacting my personal life. My mental health was suffering and I was not happy in any way with myself or life in general. I started suffering from increased anxiety and depression and my family started to see the impact of this stress on me as well as how I interacted with them.

I know I can do the job, but the stress I put on myself caused me to loose my confidence and shook me to my core. I have been working on getting myself back together and I have made progress, but I am not 100% just yet.

So I decided that I needed to take a step away and back. I need to remove myself from the sources of this stress until I can work out how to better handle it. With that, I am going to be leaving AWS in the next couple of weeks. I’m going to take a few days to myself, and find something that I can do that is still challenging to me professionally yet not as far out of my comfort zone that I fall back into the same situation as where I am at now. I have something lined up I think would be fun and interesting and do more with the DevOps stuff.

I’m also hoping to get back into my social responsibilities and community building here local. I’m working on putting together a developer community here in town. Expect to see more posts and updates from me as I work on skills and try and build something fun and cool to keep learning.

Look for me and my bot to be more social, I have plans for him to get fun updates and maybe responses to people messaging him. I now have him running in a container on my Raspberry Pi Swarm cluster.

I’m also digging into web development. I’m learning Swift still, but will be branching out into other languages as soon as I figure out how much time I really have. Expect that to show up, in containers, on my cluster.

So that is where I am at. I’m working on how I see myself, and hope to be back to seeing the Awesome Me before too long. Lessons have been learned, and steps are being taken to focus on me.

My advice on this whole thing? Take care of yourself. Mental health is no joke and can really affect you in ways you may never have understood or guessed.