Sauron

When my team started discussing what challenge we should challenge. I was already mostly sure of which one we were going to choose. Enough so that I had prematurely started white boarding. The challenge that immediatley caught my attention was PNC's. To create a data observability platform to improve insight into the sources, transformations and destinations of data in a data rich environment. There are a lot of tools that already do this. Many very well developed with rich bodies of research an unimaginable scale of human effort. This is why I was so interested. Distributed systems are hard! So hard!!! So so so hard!! My team agreed! So we got to do a distributed systems project. And bang our heads against apache kafka. And fight with kubernetes all night and into a delirious morning. And we built something that we are excited by. That lights my teams, joy in engineering and problem solving. And it was so fun and hard and tiring. And we laughed and cried and learned and enjoyed the engineering work!