The Sprint That Echoed
A Koffeemocha Memoir Preview on Appreciation, Trust, and Becoming
Earlier today, I opened one of my old notebooks — dated August 2020 — and there it was: a list of names, upgrades, sprint notes, scribbled thoughts. Nothing out of the ordinary.
But the moment I saw it, I felt something … as I often ask myself:
What changed in the last five years?
And what might change in the next five years ?
It’s not a performance review. It’s a ritual. A way to check if who I’ve become is aligned with where I’ve been.
Because that page brought me back to one of the most memorable sprints I experienced during my time at OT — a period that, while not final, captured something essential about the engineer, leader, and human I was becoming.
August 2020: A Memorable Sprint in the Middle
This wasn’t my last chapter career wise to be memorable.
But this particular sprint — those first two weeks of August — stood out for their coherence.
We were building and breaking, guiding and cleaning, all at once.
I was overseeing operations across a large-scale hybrid PaaS cloud platform built on VMware and GCP. Our architecture was dense but elegant: BOSH + Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, Docker, Kafka, PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, and CI/CD pipelines syncing teams across six time zones.
And during those weeks, everything converged:
We coordinated nginx ingress Helm upgrades.
We initiated Java buildpack cleanups and platform stack retirements.
We ran into a surprise xDB fire-drill that exposed just how much undocumented knowledge we still carried.
We mapped the entire PostgreSQL upgrade flow — down to replication slots and rollback sequences.
We enforced GitOps commit traceability, bridging code with accountability.
We reviewed resumes, job descriptions, and onboarding plans — all while the infrastructure evolved beneath us.
It was a lot.
But no one flinched.
The Team (Renamed, Remembered)
I won’t use their real names here — but if they ever read this, they’ll know.
Noah, who architected the PostgreSQL recovery plan as if he were carving stone
Clara, who absorbed ElasticSearch and made it sing before most could spell Kibana
Eli, our Kubernetes first-responder, rebooting systems and restoring flow before sunrise
Rhea, who turned INFRA noise into signals
Farah, who diagrammed the Postgres upgrade like a subway map — and we followed it like gospel
Ari, our soon-to-join teammate, whose profile made us want to do better — to leave things readier than we found them
Josh — especially in the Cloud Foundry trenches — running BOSH resurrectors, juggling drain scripts, patching VM clusters while staying invisible to everyone except the ones who truly knew where uptime came from.
The Light Brew Behind It All
Looking back, I see how those two weeks embodied the quiet rhythm of what I now call BREW:
Boldness in handling systems under pressure.
Resonance in how we trusted one another implicitly.
Elevation in every moment lifting each other up with their unique skillsets.
Wonder in how clearly I remember it — even now.
But this isn’t a framework essay.
This is a thank-you letter.
To the sprint.
To the people.
To the person I was — and was becoming.
If I Ever Write My Memoir…
Let’s say one day I do.
This sprint won’t be the headline.
But it’ll be there — a chapter called “The Middle Core That Mattered if you do Pilates”. Because what makes a sprint unforgettable isn’t how fast we moved.
It’s how present we were,
How resilient we became,
How much we trusted one another.
And how deeply we cared, even when the job demanded our full attention.
Final Sip
So I close with a simple SIP — my own way of slowing down and honoring what came before:
Slow – to revisit not the metrics, but the moments.
Intentional – in choosing to remember and share.
Present – because reflection, like resilience, is only useful if it lives in the present moment.
To those who were part of that sprint:
You may not remember it the way I do.
But I remember you.
And because of that,
I became someone ready to let go — and begin again.
☕– Kefei
P.S. As I prepare for another kind of journey — one less about systems and more about symphonies and shadows — I carry the echo of this sprint with me. More on that soon.