I need a 25th hour in my SRE Life

I have contributed something valuable to my kids today, I wanted to share that experience.

August 19, 2021

11:00 PM – I am telling critter stories to my 2-year-old son with my own characters and new additions to the original story. And we both sleep eventually.

3:30 AM – Woke up by a Pager Duty alarm. Jumped in a call to resolve the issues.

4:30 AM – Tests were failing for more than 12 hours. I had to wake up at 3 AM to fix it. Not able to sleep and brain is active. So started to hack some 3d modeling in Houdini.

7:00 AM – Feeling very sluggish. Checked the calendar. The day is free. Took a floating holiday to take some rest.

9:00 AM – After family time, and soothing my cranky kids, had to connect with the team to give some directions.

10:30 AM – Feeling very tired, but the brain is still active. So, wanted to feed something to the brain. And, I remembered that I wanted to set up my blogs on Hostinger.

11:00 AM – Hostinger offered a free domain. But it did not give enough options to choose the domain as other providers do. I just tried to check if a domain name is available with my son’s name, but Hostinger just went ahead and registered the domain (???). So now I have a domain name with my son’s name. What do I do with that? (!!! I wanted a different name).

11:30 AM – Decided to do something useful for my kid, so that he can use the domain if he wanted. Wanted to link that domain with my kid’s youtube channel. And started setting up WordPress on that account.

4:00 PM – Even after buying a couple of themes from Envato, switching between the themes, I could not get anything working. The themes were not tested with the latest WordPress version, Themes demanding Pro versions, every theme requiring their own plugins, plugins demanding Pro versions. Finally settled on one theme, but that still required me to hack some HTML & CSS, which I never expected to do from a commercial theme.

6:00 PM – All the tweaks were done, and finally, I have something working. Adding some blogs, and dealing with SEO & the basic version of Plugins do not offer enough flexibility. Finally, just started to post a welcome post using native WordPress builder.

7:00 PM – Another Emergency PagerDuty Call. Jumped in and resolved the issues. The few critical releases we planned did not go well.

7:30 PM – Had to replan the critical fixes promotion which requires timing & coordination. Created the plans.

8:30 PM – Raised a few PRs, which should be applied on a very short window to avoid failures. Nobody was there to approve. And surprisingly, I got a request for Evidence for my L1 visa extension. Why? Still checking and pinging people to approve PRs. No luck.

11:00 PM – Reading Mog the cat stories to my two-year-old. And he wants to sleep on my shoulders.

11:30 PM – Finally got approvals. But it is too late. Everyone went to sleep. So, waited for some more time to see if I can promote the critical fixes. Nope. Not today.

12:00 AM – Went to bed. Again, the brain is active and is expected to feed something. Could not sleep. Thinking about my L1 Visa Request for Evidence (RFE). I have only 15 days left in the USA and what I will do next? Will I get the visa? If not what are my alternatives? What I will do if I go back to India?

1:30 AM – Still the brain is active. Did some more work on my Kid’s site. Cleaning posts, plugins, enabling Google Analytics, Monster Insight, etc.

2:45 AM – Wanted to write my experience today and my achievements. Particularly the investment made in my kid’s life on my tired floating holiday. Reading and posting on social media.

4:00 AM – Here again, I am at the end of my day, and it is more than 24 hours now. My brain is still active. The body is so tired. And I am feeling worse than what I felt yesterday.

Once upon a time, my old boss said, “Rajan needs a 25th hour.” And this is one of my 25th hour.

I know, I have to drink a lot of fluids tomorrow, to compensate for the 25th hour.