Australia Entry #11 - October 23rd, 2024 - October 31st, 2024

Singapore for Work

Busy, busy, busy. That’s been the story of October so far and all of it has been in preparation for the trip to get to Singapore and help with the first DR cutover my customer was performing over the upcoming weekend. Even though I had been working with hospitals for almost three years now, you never really have an opportunity to do too many things in person to gain perspective of what you are working on and how many people it affects. That’s where events like this really do ground you back to reality to remind you that there are usually thousands of people relying on using the system you keep up and operational 24/7. I had only ever been on site at two other customers and both of those were during implementation trips where the customer was first starting their journey with Epic, and so while it was important to get work done during those trips, I never had this large/planned event with all the other applications in the loop as well.

For the first few days, I was focused on work and making sure we all felt as comfortable as we could leading into the big event, and it was the first time in my time at Epic where we had dozens of people sitting together throughout the night all around a conference table. I made sure to get as much sleep as I could the night before and all of Saturday I stayed within my hotel room, forcing myself to sleep more than my body wanted. In the back of my head, since early October, and maybe even earlier, I always felt that this being the first DR cutover we were doing, something would inevitably come up, and yet there is only so much you can do to prepare to try to mitigate it. I’m not the most technical Server Systems person on the team, I wouldn’t even say I’m close when compared to others in my tenure, but I made sure to review different areas of what could go wrong together with the Singapore ODBAs, but also on my own time to give myself the best shot at making this a successful trip. And of course, as we sit down getting ready to run the first command of the night that initiates the cutover we hit an error. While I wasn’t able to single-handedly lead the team around the errors we were seeing, I was happy with my own abilities to recognize problems and efficiently communicate the items back to the experts who I looped into the problems. Some issues I was able to handle on my own… others I felt like I was on the right track but just missing the couple of years of experience to know what keywords to search for in log files or connect certain error messages with issues, but my troubleshooting path was at least going to the right commands or files to search for the next steps. While we were expected to be completed with the work by 4 AM, we ended up working through resolving problems throughout 7 AM, and Monday would have us working through 10:30 PM resolving some of the residual issues, some of which I self inflicted when working on investigating other issues the night of the cutover.

To some extent I am grateful for the experience of being the one, as Zhi Long, one of the ODBAs at Singapore said, “in the hot seat” for the event. Again, in my role at Epic, I work with supporting our customers, but rarely am I ever the one that needs to experience first hand an issue that I don’t know well enough where the real next steps are simply to escalate and reach out to further support staff. Usually, I’m the one being reached out to, and so it gives a better appreciation for the empathetic side of knowing what someone I may be supporting is going through. I had initially planned to spend the time in Singapore enjoying time with my ODBAs and learning more about their lives outside of work and simply chatting, but I realize that, at least for me, something always seems to pop up and demand my attention, and I can either ignore it and enjoy my time or face it head on and come out on the other side with new experiences to shape me as a person. Maybe there will be another trip sometime next year where things will go smoothly and then I can sit back and enjoy the fruits of all the planning and work that lead to it, but until that time comes I’ll be down in the trenches working as hard as I can so that everyone else feels more confident.

Singapore for Fun

Beyond the stress of work and some days coming back to the hotel room late or staying up late to write up documentation of the night before, I did have two days to explore Singapore and see all it has to offer. When I first landed in Singapore, I think the thing that caught my eye the most was the complete 180 of temperature and humidity as well as the large amount of skyscrapers and glass structures all around. I don’t think there are many places in the world where you can look in multiple directions and see skyscrapers on all sides. Typically, what I’ve experienced is that cities have a downtown and that downtown is the area that is built up towards the sky, however in Singapore it was as if there were multiple subsections of these areas, where every so often another group of skyscrapers showed the next larger hub. On one of my first days, Thursday, after work, I made a last minute decision while talking with Xiaobin, one of the ODBAs, that I think I might just walk home from the office we were working at to my hotel. It was a two hour walk, but I felt like I got to see more nooks and crannies and the real energy of the city than I got to see on some of the other days exploring more central tourist areas. I made further split decisions like this throughout the trip, talking a walk to see the National University of Singapore also on a split decision right after work and then walking around Sentosa past sunset where I definitely got lost in one of the larger parking garages for like half an hour, haha.

I’ve noticed that I find myself most happy just walking around and taking in the different buildings and auras that different parts of a city give off. I had always had a deep respect for architecture, and I always think back about how, if I had gone to university a few years after I did, I may have made a different decision where instead of going for electrical engineering I would have went for architectural design. It’s always been something that I’ve wanted to explore more of, but I am content with not having the time that I want to at the moment to get into it. I’ve gotten a few books, and I’ve kept a spreadsheet on some of my walks from the US and from other countries about different styles. Singapore had it’s own unique neighborhoods, and while I was really impressed with the large concrete and glass skyscrapers with live plants flowing out of their crevices, I also had a similar respect to some of the simpler buildings and skinnier, European-like alleyways that connected cities. I could definitely feel that the buildings in Singapore where created with more love and motivation for new ideas than many of the cities in the US are and their cookie cutter mass-produced buildings. All in to say, I think that the density and the multiple layers of interest created a more interesting place to walk through and explore, even more so than some of the tourist places like Marina Bay Sands or Sentosa were able to create within me.

On Sunday, after the DR cutover event, I had decided to not go back to my hotel room to sleep, even with being up for the last 12 hours actively working on the event, but instead I went to the hotel to shower, eat breakfast and talk out to start going downtown and towards Chinatown and Marina Bay Sands. Looking back, I’m not sure how I had the energy, but I stayed out, doing a lot of my travel by walking not by taking any public transportation, until around 7 PM, at which point I got back to my hotel and fell straight asleep. On Wednesday, due to a change in plans for when we were going to be cutting over the Reporting environment, I ended up having a day to explore Singapore as it was initially suppose to be a recovery day leading into traveling back to Australia with some additional after hours work. While I had done some exploration in the main city in the previous days, I decided to go walk in their central greenspace and park. I ended up taking whatever route I was feeling in the moment, ended up walking near some highways, going through a cementary, a golf course, and eventually finding myself in a forested area with a ton of monkeys that I did not know would be there.

I think spending multiple days in the humid heat of Singapore had also solidified in my mind that I am definitely a colder, winter person. I prefer to be able to put on more layers versus walking and sweating and having to have a change of clothes ready every day due to the sweat. Even here in Australia I have yet to turn on the A/C or Heat as it’s more plausible to be able to huddle up with a blanket if it’s cold or open up a window and air out the room if it’s getting stuffy. That being said, the water at the beach in Sentosa was definitely the warmest water I had every stepped foot in, and I can see why people would like to go to beaches and holiday there. I’m just not sure it’s for me as a permanent place to live.