– August 19, 2021 –
Jason Rahman is a software engineer for a large tech company, and has been a part of the KIROS community. He wrote this testimony to encourage us to see God’s hand in our own everyday work.
This past January I joined a new team at work after nearly 4.5 years on my first team. When I joined the new team, they were desperately fighting to improve the efficiency of our service. Several server resources (memory bandwidth and CPU time) were running critically low, threatening to take down our team’s service (and by extension the entire site). 2-3 engineers were working nearly full time to make the service more efficient to avoid further outages.
This past February, before leaving for a trip to the YWAM base in Kona, I was performing some analysis on an unrelated project at work. I noticed some anomalies in our service that stood out, but couldn’t be explained. Eventually I ran into some dead ends on the investigation and headed off to Kona. Working from the base was challenging. Occasionally spotty internet, difficulty focusing with lots of activities going on, distractions (could hear preaching and worship from the outdoor pavilions next door non-stop) and not having access to my proper office was adding a lot of friction. By the second Tuesday, I was about to entirely give up on investigating the anomalies. I had already spent too much time on this investigation, and I felt I needed to catch up on other work.
That night at the end of a meeting, a friend offered to pray for anyone who was struggling to work remotely. Normally I wouldn’t take an offer like that up, but this time I felt a nudge that I should. A small group gathered and prayed over my work that night. The next morning, I felt a prompt from God to keep digging deeper into the investigation. A couple hours into the morning, I finally stumbled across the bug that was causing the anomaly. It took a mere 2 lines of code to fix. When I ran a test with the fix, there was a 5% savings on one of the critical resources that our team was trying to conserve!
A 2 line fix gave us a resource savings that the other engineers were spending 2-3 months on projects to have a similar effect! The savings across our entire server fleet was potentially tens of millions of dollars. Other senior engineers were recommending nominating the fix as the company wide Fix Of The Week to be presented with the CEO. I was even asked to give presentations on the fix to my team’s organization and the broader infrastructure team.
Around this time I was also debating whether to take an extra week of PTO, or try to keep working to catch up since I felt behind. After the fix that Wednesday, I felt convicted that if God provided for my work in this way, he would continue to do so. So I took that following week off. And God showed up in a big way. The first Monday morning after I returned from the extra week of PTO, I found another bug. This time, only a single line of code to change, and the savings was nearly 3x the saving of the first fix! The team and my managers were thrilled at such a huge savings for these critical resources. From these experiences, my takeaways were that God was leading me to a place of deeper trust that he would provide for my work, and that not only does God care about me, but also about the work itself.
