ASXD - 2022 Year In Review

Over the years we worked on many topics, that although may have been great ideas never really saw the light of day for various reasons. This year, hell or high water we would introduce very little without having a "buddy" from the business to work along and upskill with us and we can see the results in the success rates of the projects. Everyone of our really interesting topics (some coming to mind are Commercial A-Team / COF Open Orders / Overwatch / Warehouse Scorecards to name a few) are based on solid partnerships with the business and think (like in previous years) this one will stick and be one of the principles driving our future ways of working.

This year we really started to see ourselves evolving our practices and maturing the way we did things. Be it the introduction of more and more APIs, starting to look deeply into DevOps practices for our infrastructure - code practices for our DRS pipelines and the enormous effort of health check monitoring and the ongoing associated improvements. This was really the year we started to refine and sharpen the way we do things!

There were many open questions at the start of this year if hub posts were really worth the effort - and even more importantly if it would have any impact on the data driven org / Satair at large... It's easy to forget we had never made a post before this year - but month on month we could see the number of people reacting to the content increasing, the amount of people writing back privately to say how much they enjoyed / laughed at the content. One thing I'm certain of, we played our part in challenging the status quo and leaving our own unique little footprint on the hub.

Easy to forget but for around 1/3 of this year I was completely out as well as the fact we were another 2 headcount below plan, combined with extended vacations & shifting countries - this put enormous pressure on just about everything - our ability to continue delivering / developing new features, keeping the place afloat but on top you all took the chance and developed yourselves in parallel. For some it was a bit of "baptism by fire" but you all took on the challenge and smashed it!

The journey of blocks has been one hell of a ride - from the early days of BiFrost to analysts writing DAGs themselves to users now creating workflows in Contour for conversion to Python with predefined libraries. We've had to build up our GitOps capabilities from nothing and are now moving from a patched together OpenShift 3 instance to genuinely an industry best practice setup for OpenShift 4. The amount of internal skills we've developed due to this project is mind blowing - combining this with the benefit it should hopefully bring the business makes it one of our cornerstone projects moving forward - I think this project really summarizes what ASXD is all about!

For most of last year (and even early this year) we were struggling to break the 400 users per month barrier. This year though we've constantly had well over 500 users per month landing us in the top 10 in all of Airbus and at around 40% of all Satair users. This combined with the mountains of data and DRS's in the area is an absolutely incredible achievement considering where we've come from! I think everyone of us can be enormously proud to say that what we've achieved in Skywise really is benchmark within all of Airbus...

78.1% Average Delivery Rate
0 World Cups For Germany
24 Tacos
5 Potatoes (Up 66%)
894762 Zombie Processes Killed
562 Unique Skywise Users
7.2 Average MeWeGo
101 Days Clint Missed
3 New Team Members
Olumide 2022 FPL Champion 🏆

Having been apart of this team was something enormously special. I can say from experience these moments don't happen so often in a career which really does make them all the more precious.
I've learnt so much from all of you (both soft and hard aspects) and I'd like to think that all of us are better people / employees due to the time we've spent together in ASXD. It really is a little sad to know our team will be evolving from this little collection of friends to something significantly larger - although if I'm honest, this transition means we managed to pull off what we originally aimed at doing. This transition means we can very clearly say our last years were successful and that's due to each and every one of you.
This may be the end of an era, but it's also the beginning of something new altogether. These past years truly have been some of my fondest working memories and I will remember you all for what a special thing we made here 🙏