Never Stop Learning
Thirsting for Knowledge
One of the best pieces of advice I was given early in my career was to “never stop learning.” This is something I speak about with my engineers regularly in our 1:1s. In software, and truly in every industry, the day you think you have it all figured out and stop desiring to learn new things, you start your journey towards being left behind.
Early Passion for Technology
Technology has always been a passion of mine. Just the other day I was telling my wife a story about how in 1st grade at my elementary school in Seattle, WA, there was a “student of the week” from every class. When it was your turn to be the student of the week, you would answer some questions for a one-page write-up that would be at the front of the school, near the entry doors, for all other students to read. One of the questions was “what do you want to be when you grow up” and I put “computer programmer.” This was back in the 90s, and I have to say that this has not really changed. I have always been fascinated with technology, both in the software world but also with hardware.
Professional Journey
I have been blessed with being able to spend over a decade working in fields I truly love:
- Desktop and Systems engineering in healthcare
- Systems engineering and service delivery management in the financial sector
- Software engineering at a Series A startup
- Automation and software engineering in the aviation industry
Each of these roles came with unique challenges, plenty to learn, and a variety of skills to exercise. When I decided to take the leap into people leadership in March 2020 (heck of a time to do that, another post on this adventure coming soon), I realized that while interpersonal muscles were being exercised, and I really enjoyed that, I needed to keep my engineering chops up if I wanted to stay relevant in this industry.
The Night Owl Advantage
My friends know that I am a true night owl. It’s a rare day where I’m in bed before 2 AM and there is something truly magical about the time between 10 PM and 2 AM. This is where I am most creative and where I get the mental boost to learn new things. Throughout the pandemic, I would keep up with the latest trends affecting my engineers and our direction in projects by developing solutions with similar stacks to deploy either in my Kubernetes cluster in the home lab or to various solutions in the cloud.
Preparing for Uncertainty
In those early days of the pandemic, when we did not know if we would be able to backfill any positions that were lost. I wanted to keep warmed up, like a relief pitcher in the bullpen, ready to be thrown into the work at a moment’s notice. Thankfully that did not happen, but I have wanted to keep my skills sharp, even if there was not a practical business need for them in my role.
Diving into Frontend Development
This leads me to frontend development. Throughout my career, I have been a backend engineer. Whether it was writing infrastructure-as-code solutions using Chef, Terraform, Ansible, or Shell (dotfiles for the win!) to building backend solutions using Golang or C#, all my development focused on code that nobody would see, but you were thankful it was there doing its thing in the background. Frontend has been that elusive skillset that I never wanted to pursue but knew eventually I’d have to dive into it. Thanks to some amazing engineers I have worked with, such as @Geoff Rich, I have been introduced to the Svelte web framework. At a previous employer, we used Svelte for some of our solutions that needed to be lightweight and performant, even in times of questionable connectivity. Svelte fit the bill for that project. Now I wanted to retool my aging mahercode.io site to use Svelte, so this is my first attempt to do so.
Conclusion
I’m looking forward to using this platform to reflect on the things I am going through and working on, and I hope you’ll join me on the journey as well!
Until the next post, all the best.
-Chris
