Living the Version 1 DNA outside of 9–5
Living the Version 1 DNA outside of 9–5
Effectively launching yourself down a mountain on a souped-up piece of wood could be seen as ridiculous and dangerous. Yet it’s also addictive. Much like programmers get into code, snowboarders get into snow.
Suddenly waking up at 3am to drive five hours to Scotland, in time for the first chair lift of the day at Glencoe seemed like a perfectly standard idea.
Personal commitment. Being told ‘if you can snowboard in Scotland, then you can snowboard anywhere’ was enough to raise an eyebrow as I discovered what the locals really meant behind this sentence. Having zero warning of incoming whiteouts, avoiding boulders and crevasses partway down a run and fighting against the bracing Scottish gale force winds, is surely enough to put people off. But no. Another season, another piste. Another version of docker, another chance at deployment.
Drive. There’s a reason I go back for a snow fix every year. That rush of adrenaline — like the rush you get when your EC2 instance finally deploys the Springboot app (or maybe that was just for us in the Newcastle Academy).
Excellence in action. Spring 2023, Alpe d’Huez with 9 pals. Personal commitment led to agreeing to complete the longest black run in Europe, La Sarenne. Tick. Black and red pistes ticked off. Now to relax with a green piste on day 5/7, en route to stop for a hot chocolate. What I thought was a slope of untouched, pristine snow, turned out to be a 25% gradient of sheer ice which I very quickly discovered when I slammed and only my right arm broke my fall. Cue a French first aider and a trip down the mountain on the back of a ski mobile, sirens a-blaring, to the hospital. X-ray confirmed, a broken radius in my right arm and two hours later, I was back in the sunshine with a stunning blue cast, stinging eyes from crying through the pain as the French doctor pulled my arm back into place without any anaesthetic, dosed up on painkillers and whatever else the pharmacist gave me in French that I didn’t understand. If only I could remember more than ‘où est la piscine?’ from the days of GCSE.
A return to my job as Assistant Director of a language school, with my right arm out of use, meant I couldn’t do my usual role — I attempted to deliver lessons and write with my left hand on the board, much to all of the adult students amusement. Customer First - it forced me to take a step back. I’d reached a plateau and was no longer learning. In snowboarding, if you reach a plateau, you want to escape as soon as possible otherwise you’d soon come to a halt. Drive. It was time for a change. An application onto Version 1’s Digital Academy followed — something I never thought I’d be able to do without a STEM background.
Excellence in action. What had gone from seeming like hurdles — opening toothpaste between my knees, tying my shoelaces with one hand and other daily (arguably menial) tasks, quickly changed to talk of Raspberry Pi (not the edible kind), other types of snow for data storage and languages I’d never heard of prior to this.
You’ll find me swapping those steep snow pistes for steep learning curves in the virtual clouds now.
About the Author:
Sarah Lally is an Associate AWS DevOps Engineer at Version 1.
