gosenx

what do you mean?

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

You really motivated me here. Thank you. I'm planning to getting into containerd and kubernetes.

I will have something to show for by the mid-year. I'm sure. Thank you.

How far into your career are you in? I imagine that it is frustrating to see your efforts go to waste.

How did you grow? I imagine that to become a director one must have had a very good IC career and accomplishments.

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.

Ohh I’m jealous of you. I dream of coming near that number this year on my personal projects.

I’m in the market looking for something in the intersection of infra/systems programming.

It has been tough to get interviews due to my location and experience, but I know I will manage to do it.

Are you self employed or working for a company?

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’m sure that being an IC for 15years helped you develop the technical sharpness that allows you to make decisions and do deep dives occasionally.

I want to be in the 70-90% of coding now because as I improve and move up I will not have had a stretch of deep programming experience.

If you can think of anything, what would you advise me to do?

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.

I don't know if anyone feels the same, but lately I have been regretting not have _enjoyed university_ because I wanted to rush to get a job.

There is so much knowledge to acquire getting a degree that I kinda think that there is some agenda of making this generation dumber and dumber.

One of the things that college does well, is to teach stuff that you don't think you need, but that are so important for you.

Those that only do what their brain wants, optimize for what is more comfortable to them while university takes you out of your comfort zone.

Are there things that can be improved, yes! Of course. But go to college and have some fun learning.

Great point

Computer Science in general, or more specific to distributed systems, networking, cloud computing.

This guide by Beej is pretty good https://beej.us/guide/bgnet0/, he has a similae one on Network programming.

Also reading TCP and IP RFCs will greatly help you.

I just discovered that kB, KiB mean two different things. How many of you knew about this? And has it impacted anything you have worked on?

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.