As part of a team that owns a service which runs 24x7, we have to watch livesite and monitor for any issues or things that might become issues and impact our customers. We have two rotations to cover this .. one is DOTD (dev of the day). Since there are 70ish devs, this happens once in 70 days. Not so bad. We aldo have LiveSite PM ... since there are only 4 of us PMs, this is one week out of 4. For that one week you are on-call 24x7 and responsible for all things related to livesite. I know, not awesome ... but hear me out.
So the May 5th weekend I was on LiveSite duty. Saturday and Sunday were amazingly beautiful weather. Saturday was pretty involved so i only got to sneak out for a 37 minute (5 mile) run. I was a bit bummed but really enjoyed watching the sun set as I ran. Sunday things were a bit quieter and it looked to be a bit more relaxed ... here comes the fast part :) I decided to take control and go for a ride. I had hoped to go Mountain Biking but that ws not in the cards. With a deployment in progress i'd need to push some buttons, etc every 1.5 hours or so ...
Living on Lake Samammish has it's advantages ... off I went on my road bike, from my front door ... it's a 25 mile loop with 900 feet of climbing from the house. I'd do a loop, check my phone for email/etc every 30 min, and race back to the house to do a few things before heading out again. Each loop took me just under 1.5 hours and i got in 3 such loops on a day when i could have 'thrown' in the towel and stuck it out on the trainer (this makes for a very grumpy Monilee). So how does it make me faster? Well about 1/2 to 3/4 the way thru each loop i'd have an email request to do something and i'd have to hammer back as fast as possible! :) Extra motivation to turn the pedals over!
I'll take 75 interrupted miles in the sun over a trainer ride any day!!!
