Journey to the Mzansi Cloud
The Solution is X. The Problem is Why?
When I was younger — say around six or seven — my mother had taken me to the local office furniture and appliance store OfficeMart. There, they were showcasing this new device they called the personal computer. It was running Windows 95 and a very curious media sequence that ended with the prompt:
“Where do you want to go today?”
Now I had never used a computer before, and I remember it like IT was yesterday — what do you think my instinctive reaction was? Of course, I clicked on Start… Since I was already playing around with words, having a fascination for writing, of course (after some menu browsing) I clicked on Wordpad. Anxious and frozen in awe, I saw my first window open. After about a minute of realising what it is that I was actually doing, I proceeded to type the first word that came into my mind. Ironically enough, it was “apple”. Keep in mind, this is long before I had discovered the movie Pirates of the Silicon Valley (that’s another story).
I punched a few more words into this Packard Bell and timidly I toyed around with the mouse and discovered how to select these words, and then I started to change the size of the words,
72pt,
bold,
italics,
…you name it, I was clicking on it! After a while of more curious discoveries in Wordpad, I stopped and took a few steps back from the demo machine. It took a few minutes to process, but then I ’clicked’. I didn’t know exactly how this machine was able to allow me to write bigger… in cursive…. in RED CAPITALS, in whichever way I felt, but I knew this:
I had to find out.
So began my journey with technology. Over the coming years it was my sole mandate to figure it all out. Cutting, pasting, crashing, trashing, pausing, breaking, fixing, upgrading — I had to get one step closer to understanding the nature of IT, reason of IT, the purpose of IT.
Fast forward several years later after school, finding my feet freelance consulting as a systems engineer, the cloud happened. Wow! What an exciting time — something was shifting in the industry — but I had no idea what it was! In fact to be honest, I don’t think any of us did at the time. I always did have some learning challenges growing up and I was equally as insecure as my peers, if not, even more so. I remember during a telephonic interview for a technical lead I had been asked by the interviewer (subsequently whom had become my mentor):
“Could you explain the difference between Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service?”
I froze up. The same kind of anxiety I felt when I first opened that can of worms called Wordpad when I was younger. I took a shy guess at answering the question. Now I still can’t recall to this day whether my answer was right or wrong, but I do know I ‘winged it’ and I had got that job at the managed services provider — bravely. The learning curve began all over again: my new mentor had shattered everything I knew about break/fix methodology, technical support, and customer service. I was transforming. I started to understand key concepts such as proactive triggers, ticketing, automation, and preventative maintenance — the cornerstones of managed services. Ten years in the industry, after following a constant pattern: feeling disrupted, becoming transformed, feeling disrupted, becoming transformed, I now find my curious cursor pursuing new and innovative skills like data science, serverless architecture, decentralised applications, machine learning, and business intelligence. But then, I thought to myself: “Why am I doing this?”,
“Where am I really going today?”
I began to take flight. I nubivagantly traversed and circumnavigated the native cloud landscape wandering from one infrastructure provider to the next. I even moved around the country, indulging in some ‘design time’ in Cape Town where I made those odd nefelibata jokes with the gurus at Amazon, I tried my luck playing tense-or-flow with the polymaths at Google, bought an iPhone from that Genius at Apple, deleted my Facebook, and even moved back to Johannesburg wearing a suit + tie to impress those boys at Microsoft. I was learning it all, attending the meetups, doing the startup coffee grinds, the startup hackathons, the startup slackathons, the startup ‘hat-athons’, pretending like I was starting up, actually starting up, realising that I never actually started up at all, chasing them unicorns, chasing them cockroaches, participating in round tables, getting bounced from round tables, igniting fireside chats, putting out fireside chats, and (my all-time favourite) hosting those crowd-pleasing unConferences. I was on a mission!
Consistently searching,
Relentlessly pondering,
‘Solving for x’…
Then, after having spent some time in the South African cloud sector I started to unravel — something was not right. It became quickly evident to me a new riddle had emerged:
“One of us, is not like the rest.”
I began questioning, searching fearlessly for the answer to this riddle. However this time, instead of being a victim of disruption, I was disrupting someone else. I fled to my community, to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook (some things can’t be deleted), and my questions began to pour out…
“Who said we couldn't scale?”
“Why are we the dark continent?”
“What power requirements does a data center need to meet regulatory compliance?”
“Where is the private sector in offering sustainable energy solutions?”
“How do we transform?”
This is why 2017 is pivotal in my growth as a professional in my industry: when I found out in May that South Africa was finally the recipient of hyper-scalable public cloud infrastructure — effectively putting this entire continent ‘on the map’ so to speak — I was overjoyed. I felt a wave of satisfaction, a sense of purpose that in my small capacity, being a part of the greater sum, I had actually achieved something, not just for myself but for the greater ecosystem to which I belonged. I got a glimpse of the future ahead for my land, I was satisfied in knowing that this continent’s transformation is soon to be unlocked. I am secure now that agriculture has an IoT roadmap, using big data and analytics our crops would be able to thrive and our rich soil can yield more produce. I am excited to envision the new locally available business applications that would alleviate our operational and logistical nightmares, extending our industries beyond the ceiling. I am eager to explore the new possibilities at hand in education and skills development as we harness innovative collaboration solutions designed to enable learning across borders and finally ‘zero the divide’. I am also fairly encouraged (and equally as scared) to see how blockchain technologies such as Ethereum could disrupt and revolutionise our financial, legal, and municipal institutions as we know them — ending corruption in governance, fulfilling the contracts of Mzansi’s constitution, truly democratising this beautiful nation.
This, is humbling.
This, is powerful.
This, is transformation.
My only aspiration that remains today is that I continue my growth as an engineer, regardless of what capacity. Whether it be in architecture and development, user experience and storytelling, or leadership and support — I know that my journey to the cloud is definitely not over — in fact…
PS C:\EFI\Boot\> echo Globally zoning Mzansi since 2018.
Thank you Microsoft, for helping me and this country achieve more!
One love, Matt ✌ ᶠᵃᶤʳˡʸ ˡᵒᶜᵃˡ
What’s your story? Share your thoughts & responses with me below. ☺️
