It’s been over 7 months since I sold everything I owned and left Ghana for the abroad (Germany). What a wild time.

The day I landed in Germany was my start day. I missed my flight; don’t ask me. Doesn’t matter now.

My life and work have been going so great. My reason for living Ghana has been proven valid and I’m in pursuit of its actualization. You see, I’ve learnt many a thing since moving. Especially work wise.

For context, I’m a person that makes a living off writing software. And since moving to Berlin, I think the most interesting things I’ve learnt are ownership, taking initiative, accountability and always improving.

Let’s talk about the last point: always improving. In my current organization, we have a mechanisms that help us know the status of our systems at every point in time. These help us know when our apps are down; we call these criticals.

After every critical, we must write a post-mortem describing what caused the critical and how it we mitigated it. But we don’t stop there. We must also come up action items that are prioritized in the sprint to make sure that the critical never comes up again. Isn’t that just fascinating? This has been one of best practices I’ve learnt where it’s not just about knowing and fixing the incident but creating a space to carry out work that will prevent that incident from ever occurring again in the future and impact the business. ❤️

Instead of seeing criticals as a bad thing, every critical is an opportunity to make the system stronger and this way of thinking has permeated into my life as well. In the same way, instead of seeing failures or setbacks as bad things, I see them as an opportunity to make myself better and stronger.

Go forth and do great things.

Love, Chi ❤️