1,000 Days

 

I’ve just clocked over 1000 days at Telstra. It’s gonna get hard to play the “I’m new here” card now I guess.

It’s been a journey so far – kinda like the hero journey

heroesjourney

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

And to be honest, it pretty much sums up what happened in relation to the API Strategy work — A call to adventure, guardians, mentors, temptations, threats, challenges, revelations, transformations, atonement, a gift of the goddess and eventual return! Yup, pretty much a text book experience.

The journey was featured in a recent article at the end of July, entitled Telstra’s API revolution.  It gives a great wrap up of the work to date, and acts as a solid record of what has been done.

There have been losses along the way, and I won’t dwell on them all but I do want to mention one of my fellow travellers – Bruce Carney. We both started on the same day – brothers in arms, facing the challenges together. Bruce is no longer with us – he’s part of a new journey with Aussie software darling, Atlassian, and I do wish him well on his next journey.

So I now find myself at a transition point, a time for a new story, with some familiar folks, and some new ones as well.

I am now a member of the Innovation team at Telstra, in the Chief Technology Office, located in the world-class Gurrowa Innovation Lab in Melbourne.

The lab opened in August 2015, with lots of great coverage:

The lab is the centerpiece of Telstra’s innovation and technology research capabilities. Gurrowa, which means Interchange in the Wurung language, signifies the interchanging of ideas that will take place in this unique co-creation space that will drive the new wave of innovation at Telstra.

It has been the location for projects, events, hackathons over the past year, and with the experience gained over that time, we now have an opportunity to fine tune the way it works and make it AWESOME!

So that’s the new call to adventure.  What lies ahead? I don’t fully know, but I do know WHY we’re doing this, and that makes for a fun journey.

Huzzah!


730 Days & 23 trips to Sydney!

Today marks 2 years into my time at Telstra , and it’s really zipped along.

I even got inspired to get a “simpsons-style” cartoon of me – the orange hat is a nice touch I think.

Frank A

The last couple of these types of posts I’ve done have included a bit of a recap – 12 Months In & 546 Days so I will spare the look back, suffice to say a fair bit of stuff got done – some visible such as T.DEV speaker at I ♥ APIS in San Jose,  sponsor at Web Directions 2015, judge at Hackfood, author on Telstra Exchange; and some not so, but just as important!!

I also made a a video to be used for internal training  – here’s sneak peak

sharing

Oh, and I’ve had 23 trips to Sydney over these past 2 years. Yes, I did the maths.

OK then, so there are a few things coming up that I am looking forward to…

What else? There’s a few other things, but I’ll keep’em under my hat for the time being. It revolves around how developers took over the world and how we can respond to that.

And did i mentioned I’ve had 23 trips to Sydney !!


546 Days

Embedded image permalink

Today marks 18 months I’ve been at Telstra. Feels just like the other day I posted about 12 Months In

The last 18 months is best summed up like this – the first 6 months was spent working on the API strategy, the next 6 months was to sell the strategy, and the last 6 months to implement. So we now find ourselves at the start of the next phase.

We’ve also been a bit public over the last few months, first at APIDays in Sydney, and then I ♥ APIS, which means we got some coverage:

I’ve also been involved in a bunch of hackathons – from participating in them, running them and being a judge

So, as I had said earlier, we’re now at the start of the next phase. The developer portal is open. We have a few public APIs, and we’ve have had great community support, with blog posts, articles, and code samples.

Great to see developers being open to using these APIs and giving feedback
Onto the next 546 days…..


12 Months In

It’s been 12 months since I started with Telstra. My pass still worked after a few weeks off, so that’s a good sign.
Telstra <3 APIs

Telstra loves APIS

Anyways…. looking back on the past 12 months, lots happened …..

Enough looking back – time to look forward. Onward to the next 12.

So far the job has been pretty much inward looking, as we worked to get a API platform in place & get some APIs on-boarded to the platform.
But that’s all about about to change!
I have an upcoming talk at APIDays Sydney, titled “Telstra’s Path to API Enlightenment” and I’ll use that to describe the journey we’ve been on. (oh, and speaking of journey, I saw a great tweet recently by Aussienick which describes a similar journey)
Technology Project Management explained in one picture
So here’s to the next twelve months and beyond.

2014 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 22 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.


Daily Fitbit stats

My fitbit #Fitstats_AU for 12/29/2014: 6,592 steps and 4.8 km traveled. http://www.fitbit.com/user/229VLQ


Daily Fitbit stats

My fitbit #Fitstats_AU for 12/28/2014: 5,224 steps and 3.7 km traveled. http://www.fitbit.com/user/229VLQ


Daily Fitbit stats

My fitbit #Fitstats_AU for 12/27/2014: 21,632 steps and 15.4 km traveled. http://www.fitbit.com/user/229VLQ


Daily Fitbit stats

My fitbit #Fitstats_AU for 12/26/2014: 12,895 steps and 9.2 km traveled. http://www.fitbit.com/user/229VLQ


Daily Fitbit stats

My fitbit #Fitstats_AU for 12/24/2014: 24,845 steps and 17.8 km traveled. http://www.fitbit.com/user/229VLQ