Remembering where I’ve been…and getting back there
By: Brian Noyle
Tags: Career, Engineering, Personal Development, Maps

Before you ask which way to go, remember where you’ve been.

I don’t know who originally said it. The band All Time Low sings it, and if you Google the phrase, you’ll be treated to a ponderous collection of compass tattoos. But I still like it. 2020 has been a rolling dumpster fire and as we come to the end of another calendar, we all start to wonder what the next year will bring. Some of us are already formulating New Year’s resolutions or preparing to write pithy statements summarizing this year and providing guidance for the next. A great many of us are trying to accurately plan and run a business and given what we’ve all been walking through together this year, the barriers can seem substantial.

Photo by Dominik Dvořák on Unsplash

The other day I was treated to blog post by Greg Horejsi, a former coworker of mine. You can read all about it over here. The TLDR for me was to remember where I came from and try to get back to that in the coming months.

While I don’t necessarily “feel” all that complacent given that I’ve just spent the better part of 9 months keeping the metaphorical bus rubber-side down, I definitely feel like the career ladder has taken me away from some of things that got me to where I am as a professional. While I actively participate in platform architecture and code reviews, it’s been at least 18 months since I’ve actively written code. Maps and geospatial data are calling out to me; they were a primary focus for 16 years of my career. Coding at night on the couch has given way to strategy and long term planning, usually with a healthy dose of loading the dishwasher and making school lunches. Career advancement is a wonderful thing, but it’s also given me a case of the “used-tahs”. I used to be a builder and a maker. I used to be in the trenches. I used to feel the pain of the engineers that worked with me. Don’t get me wrong I love my role and the team building, the strategy, the big picture leadership is really enjoyable. The last several years solving complex data structures and automation puzzles has been a fantastic fire-hose style education for a full stack developer…but I think being hands on with technology and slinging code can help me be a better leader. It encourages creative problem solving, it let’s me see what is happening at the bits and bytes level that will impact business decisions later, and it keeps me abreast of what my team struggles with on the daily.

So bring on the neck beard. I’m going to build something. HTML, Javascript, Go, and maps…lots of maps. Hell, I’ve never even written in Golang. I want GCP, K3s and as many shiny cat toys as I can find.

Today I repurposed a MacBook Air and took a walk down memory lane reformatting and getting it setup as a dev machine.

While I don’t leverage all of the productivity settings these folks do and many of my hot-keys, symlinks, etc. are different, I started with a mix of these posts to get the juices flowing:

Just sitting down and typing brew update is an immensely satisfying feeling. I can’t wait for my first npm-install. In the coming weeks I’ll report back now and again with what’s happening on the engineering front. If nothing else it’s bound to be entertaining.