Stories from the people who work here

The first time I was paged on the Varda Energy platform, it was three in the morning and a batch of meter readings had arrived twice. I fixed it, wrote it up and went back to sleep feeling useful. Eighteen months later, the same alert fired, and I slept through it. Someone on Varda's own team fixed it in eleven minutes. That was the best night of the project.

Planning to leave from the first week

At KIASA we say a system is finished when the people who run it no longer need us. I had heard it at my interview and thought it was a nice line. On Varda it was a plan, with dates. In week one we named the client engineers who would own each part of the platform, and they joined our standups from the start.

For the first year, that was mostly a formality. We were building quickly and they were watching. The real handover came in the last six months, and it was harder than any of the engineering.

What actually worked

• Pairing on every incident, with the client engineer at the keyboard and me beside them.
• Writing the runbooks together, in their words, so they would read them at three in the morning.
• Stepping back on purpose: one week a month when no KIASA person was on call at all.
• Saying out loud what I did not know, so they could see it was normal not to know everything.

11 minutesto resolve the duplicate readings alert, by Varda's own team, in the final month.

The hard part

The hardest thing was not technical. It was watching someone take twice as long as I would have, and saying nothing. Every time I took the keyboard back, I taught them that they still needed me. My delivery lead, Sienna Clarke, put it simply.

“The goal is not that the fix is fast. It is that the fix is theirs.”

What I took with me

I write differently now. Every piece of code I leave behind, I imagine being read by someone tired, at night, who has never met me. I name things more plainly. I leave more comments about why and fewer about what.

I am on a new project now, with a new client and a new set of names written down in week one. I still check the Varda dashboards sometimes, out of habit. Everything is green, and none of it is mine any more. That is the point.