New Zealand Trip - Travel Diary (2)

New Zealand Trip - Travel Diary (1)

Morning woke up at 7:20 AM, quickly got ready, cooked and had breakfast and started to office. Asked the person at the hotel reception about how I can reach the office, showing the address that I had already written on a paper. He gave me a small map of Auckland, and showed how I can reach there. Actually he had shown the path to the nearest railway station. But I thought that the office itself is there. I thought I had to go to office by bus and asked if I had to take a taxi. He said its walk-able and it will take around 10 minutes. I was so happy that the office is at a walk-able distance. I happily came out of the hotel, took left on the Victoria street, and after 50 feet, took a left turn onto the Queen's street and continued to walk. I reached the Custom's road, and started searching for the building where office is located. But it was not there. I could only find a posh railway station "Britomart Transport Center". I walked up and down for sometime and then decided to call a college on mobile phone. I told him the station where I was, but he said that he doesn't know all those, and asked me check in the google maps. But, unfortunately, for some reason, net was not working on my mobile phone.

Lighting in Britomart Railway Station - The actual light is at the bottom, from which the rays are reflected by the steel ball to the dome from where it is reflected downwards, uniformly.

A train in "Britomart Transport Center".

Train Ticket.

"Britomart Transport Center" -  Common place where we get bus, train or ferries(boats).

A ferry in Britomart, that goes to a nearby island.

Another view of the Britomart Ferry Station.

[pic: Britomart Transport Center]

I went to one old gentleman who was waiting for the bus, who upon seeing the address "Remuera Road" said that its is not here and I have to take train to the next station, and from there it is at a walk-able distance. I entered the railway station, identified the ticket counter, took ticket to the next station "Newmarket" and went inside. The ticket checkers there helped me to get into the train that goes to Newmarket The trains were more or less like the new metro trains of Chennai. Time was close to 8:30 AM, and I was getting scared, I thought that I was lost and also I would be reporting very late on the very first day. I got down at Newmarkt, went out of the station, and saw the Remuera road, walked towards the left, and located the board of the client's office. Went into the office, took the lift to level 1(first floor). The receptionist looked like an Indian. Later got to know that she is form South Africa. Got introduced to the clients and started the day's work - making preliminary preparations for launching the new software in production.

An office in the Remuera Road, Auckland

Sign boards on Remuera Road, Auckland.

The Software:

In the client's company there was a room called the operations room, where many computers with lot of big monitors were connected to the production servers and the logs and the transactions were continuously monitored by people from a team called the operations team, round the clock, working on shifts. Every minute detail is noted down, and during shift change the person leaving the shift have to hand over the status and updates and many meticulous details to the next person taking up the shift. It was just a small web-services application to me, but was surprised to see how the software is closely monitored. In this particular software that is going for production, for the purpose of simplicity in developing the software, I have included some manual process in the design. Found that in actual production, this part of running the software required manual intervention for the operations team. I was a bit sad to see this, as with some more effort I could have easily avoided that manual process, it would have saved human time and effort, as this manual process has to be done everyday at 11:30 in the mid-night, during which the server has to be briefly stopped. A simple decision by me, to keep my work simple, had a huge impact in the way in which the software is run in production. That was a big learning for me, and for sure will have its impact in my software designs in future.

On the first day, while taking ticket for the return journey, I forgot the station name to which I have to go. All that I remembered was "Brito-something", tried to recall and was trying different combinations like "Brit-town", "Brit-man". So, while asking for ticket, I said "Brito-" and mumbled something for the second half. The person at the counter gave ticket for "Britomart".


The receptionist in the hotel, an Indian Guy, kept asking me various questions about the software, as he was surprised that how I can afford to stay in a posh three star hotel in the prime area of New Zealand. He asked what (computer) language he has to study to get into such jobs. I told "Java, Java is ruling the world, The mobile you have with Android is completely run by Java... the TV, the lift, the microwave oven, 70% of large enterprise production servers, all are run by Java... Java is here to stay at-least for the next 20 years."


- SPGR.