Crapoly, it's been a long time since I wrote anything. Ho hum, it's mostly for me anyway (if not, and you like this, leave a comment!)
If you get asked to lead a team, undertake challenging projects that aren't "the flavour of the month", or change your life circumstances, it could be the end of you doing serious "coding". Most people tell me all these things will make that so. Hopefully as this post demonstrates, it doesn't need to be the end of you doing engineering. It could even be the start...
For almost twenty years I skirted aside from the dangers of line management, undesirable projects and splitting my attention to other personal life goals. No longer. Since the time of the last blog (that was over 18 months ago), a lot has changed. Nearly all for the better: work, tech and life have all seen massive upheavals and though challenging, it's rewarding. Some I'll share in detail, some I won't.
The basic reason for this post is to describe some lessons learned and useful advice I've had along the way, if applicable. Or at least prime the reader for future posts if not.
Off the back of years advocating for sustainable software engineering, mostly off the back of a fellowship, I "accidentally" got to start a team of engineers. There will be more about this another time, but some key lessons I've learnt are:
Line management and leadership are not the same: this is perhaps obvious, but I didn't know it. Line management means you care about the wellbeing of those you (try to) direct in mutually agreeable directions. Leadership means you care about the organisations interests when (trying to) direct[ing] people.
Line management and leadership are both required: don't try and do one without the other (see above). The role is to ensure that you work on keeping the balance of the two, pretty much nothing else.
You'll learn more about your own character than you might have before: I've managed plenty of people and projects, but being in a position where you're caring and leading is really complicated. You'll understand more about yourself in the process. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's not. Always it's helping you grow so lean into it and learn from it.
This was not a career aspiration for me. In fact, I kind of feel like I "fell" into it through pure willingness to try and make things better for an organisation I care about working for. The idea that I could perhaps influence some positive change was a driver, but this comes at a cost and potentially might not be realised. Therefore, it's worth seeing the other benefits, which I now (after a year) see the above as being.
I was a big data, middleware type of infrastructure / devops engineer type person, dealing with keeping systems up for profit-making companies and service providers. There is nothing wrong with this, it leads to interesting infrastructures to work on. When I went to Antarctica, the pivot was from highly available, fault-tolerant, scaleable and secure infrastructure to resilient, deeply redundant and continuous infrastructure that scales. The motivators were different.
Now I work specifically on software that can, in theory, be responsible in allowing people to scale compute and serve data products for environmental science. Working on projects that seek to integrate environmental data; modelling and AI data pipelines; supercomputing platforms; and data publishing platforms is amazing fun.
The challenge is (a) the breadth of focus and (b) convincing myself that we're going in the right direction. AI in particular has a lot of questions to answer and is really very high in the peak of inflated expectations, but the same can be said for many other "cutting-edge" technologies and groundbreaking ideas_.
The method I try to employ is to (a) always have one tangible project to deliver to keep me grounded and interested in real-world delivery; and (b) to always remain skeptical!
The biggest thing that has had me in recent times is life itself. Family, home life and other businesses now pull at my attention more than ever before. As an "early millennial" (to gauge that, I recall watching Innerspace the first time it reached TV), the reality has become that the most important thing I can do is not fuck things up for the upcoming generations...
...and this gets to why I've been concentrating on the previous two items alongside the third. They are the thing I can do to try and have a positive impact. But they are not the most important thing. I can demonstrate what I've learned, but others now can learn and adapt way faster than me.
And in this vein, I've been learning more than ever so that there is something to express (writing, music, math, science, technology) from my knowledge base. I've been enjoying learning again, but it is the application of that knowledge and communication which will become more important.
That's why I'm back here, blogging pointlessly (perhaps) into the digital void: to illustrate what I'm doing for posterity and to guide myself as things distract me. In no particular order, I will hopefully describe:
Achieving any one of these will be fun. This has been rambling, but hopefully it won't be 18+ months before the next time!
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