NuclearDonkey.net

It's getting near the end of March, so it's time to start looking at how I've done on the goals I set for this quarter.

1. Make Tier2 training sessions a regular, monthly event to show others in Customer Care the ins and outs of assorted Tier2 tasks.

We had meetings in January and February but March has been a bit of a wash, though I don't necessarily consider that a bad thing. Different folks are moving on to different tasks, and so we are really at a point where more one-on-one time is a better solution than continued group meetings.

2. Learn enough Perl to be able to make more functional (not just cosmetic) changes to RT at the request of Customer Care.

Oh, the RT project. A number of changes have been made to the RT code on our secondary support server, which I've been using for beta testing. However, other projects have put the next RT live upload on hiatus for the time being. Don't worry, RT, I'll be back to wrestle with you again soon. As far as Perl goes, I'm also tinkering with some small scripts outside of RT. I definitely prefer PHP overall (it's so much easier to read, but that's partly my coming from C++ and Java which are pretty similar syntax-wise), but we use Perl so much, it will be worth knowing for way more than just RT.

3. Gain a better working knowledge of our API and its implementation with both Perl and PHP, enough to solve 70% of tickets on that issue without having to escalate the ticket.

I don't have any specific numbers to back it up, but I'd say that this goal has been met, with few API issues needing to be sent to our developers. One ticket that I recall especially well involved an interesting issue with how a SOAP client interfaces (or sometimes fails to) with a SOAP server of a different version. Many kudos to Kevin for helping with that one, as well as any other tickets that get sent up (I still can't make heads or tails out of that lousy .NET stuff).

4. Automate portions of our reseller provisioning process using API and/or database calls from a simple web interface that can be accessed by Billing, Sales, and Customer Care.

This was to be my project for Hackathon IV this weekend, though it may be taking a backseat to the setup of some new servers for a large part of the day. I already did some work on the API code to interface with our DNS system and account system, but it may be some time yet before the project is finished.

5. Further my general Linux knowledge and gain the knowledge and skills of a Red Hat Certified Engineer.

Just missed on this one. I was to attend another Red Hat course and get my RHCT at the beginning of March, but commitments to Dexter's obedience training pushed that back to the beginning of April instead. I definitely know my way around in Linux about ten times better than I did at the beginning of the quarter, but we'll see how that stacks up to what Red Hat has to throw at me.

Overall, I'm feeling pretty good about this past quarter. Not all goals were met but, like any roadmap, it's not always ideal to stick to it 100%. As to what's in store for the second quarter of this year, stay tuned.

This is Jon signing off...