I’m currently a mid-level SRE engineer cornering the senior level. My goal is to reach the principal/distinguished levels.
I’ve found myself in the I told you so moments in my team and have had an informal heads-up about a promotion. It’s too soon to even be talking about this, but I hope it gives you enough context as I’m looking forward to you advice because your last comment was really really good. Thank you for taking the time.
I’m not in Silicon Valley or any other tech hub, I’m in a small country in Africa and want to put a dent in the engineering world. A cliché I take very seriously :).
Ohh the more you write the more inspiring it gets. You cleared my thoughts towards what to do, I'll act on it. I checked you website and OSS work, really good stuff
I think I will have to find something to do on the side because everywhere I went with that I thought I would program a lot I ended up not doing much programming.
Sounds like a lot of fun. I work as Platform Engineer so I’m also on call for about 30+ a week sometimes. The only thing I don’t get to do is programming a lot, I mean I do write some Terraform, YML, Go, scripts etc but not the type of coding that you spend a month building something rather than small programs to automate and facilitate our ops work.
I want to shift from ops to systems programming and find a completely new role.
I’m really good at the debugging and diving into new codebases, but companies don’t like the fact that I don’t really have a previous full time coding role.
Happy to ear how things are going for you and how you have grown technically.
I think that what really makes us not take action after we read something is this notion of "I will get back to it later" that we get after highlighting or writing notes about it.
You have to be deliberate. If you think something is worth exploring and applying, put it in you calendar or todo list to dive deeper into it in day you have time.
Only write notes for things that a nice to have, for the crucial ones take action and write about your experience with it.
Here is how I go about it:
I have a file named on-my-mind.md where I write a short sentence over something I was thinking or thought was interesting. I keep it short. I also have a current.md with something I'm focusing on now — I it read everyday.
If I'm reading a book, I make sure to do the exercises before marking as complete and re-read each chapter after before going to the next. If what I'm learning can improve my work or life, I put it on-my-mind.md.
I consult on-my-mind.md a lot during the day, it's like a state machine for me.
If I thought something was interesting, but don't have the time budget to commit, I will put it on calendar for some day in the future so I can dive deep then. I basically send letters to my future self, and I have this contract of always acting on what I put on the calendar and/or todo list, so it has to be important before it goes there.
Great point. I remember years back when I tried to learn Webpack and I found it to be unnecessarily complex for me at the time and I did not get which problem it was trying to solve. It was only when I decided to do things on my own way that I hit limits that I had my Eureka moment.
It is sad that newcomers are told to learn this tool and that tool while they never get to know the problem those tools are solving.
Another experience that triggered an A-ha moment for me, was reading the OAuth2 RFC (6749). I had previously read multiple docs of libraries implementing the protocol and had integrated with such libraries in the past, but it was only when I read RFC and the problems the different flows try solve that it finally clicked.
I’ve found myself in the I told you so moments in my team and have had an informal heads-up about a promotion. It’s too soon to even be talking about this, but I hope it gives you enough context as I’m looking forward to you advice because your last comment was really really good. Thank you for taking the time.
I’m not in Silicon Valley or any other tech hub, I’m in a small country in Africa and want to put a dent in the engineering world. A cliché I take very seriously :).