It’s both exciting and nerve-wracking to develop highly visible production service platforms. Exciting, in that the ideation phase of creating a differentiated offering inspires “creatives” in the software engineering space to do their best work. Nerve-wracking, in that knowing the details of implementation, and what hit the editing room floor during planning/prioritization exercises, carries with it a certain sense of responsibility — especially if you end up being caught-out on any of those areas as “real usage” begins.

There was a fantastic paper written last year on the topic of creativity in software engineering. Highly encouraged reading, especially for software engineering managers, technical team leads, those involved in hiring/promotions and so forth.

In order to solve today’s complex problems in the world of software development, technical knowledge is no longer enough. Previous studies investigating and identifying nontechnical skills of software engineers show that creative skills also play an important role in tackling difficult problems.

Exploring the Role of Creativity in Software Engineering, Jan 2021, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.00837.pdf

For this blog, I’ll focus on the experience the team I led went through during the bring-up of a highly visible service launch scheduled for March, 2021 called Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA).

The ROSA service was a first-of-its-kind, first-party offering (transacted through Amazon) that would be added to the AWS console. That set the high bar for the team to deliver on what the business partnership between Red Hat and AWS had negotiated. Shortly thereafter additional first party services from partners were added to AWS console (Grafana has one at least). But indeed ROSA was the first 🙂

Continue reading “If you’re totally comfortable to launch, you’ve waited too long.” →