Long Time, No See.

Hello DEV,

I know it's been quite some time since I've really wrote anything on here. I guess it's time to come out from under my rock that I've been living under.

It's been a busy couple of years, and an exhausting career so far in Tech.

The following is a brief summary of things, thus far. I cannot go into detail about the systems I worked on, so sorry to disappoint.

AWS

My first two years (2020-2022) in Tech were like trying to drink from a fire hose. I was a junior SDE at AWS, and it was some of the most fun yet challenging work I've done in my life. To describe it as a crucible would not be an understatement, but I learned a lot, both professionally and about myself. To top it off, it was also during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which I feel put everything on-edge.

Despite AWS being a cloud provider, this team managed a sizable back-end Spring codebase that ran on baremetal. The frontend was initially Ruby-on-Rails, but that was eventually replaced by React. There was also a menagerie of Ruby, Python, and Java ops scripts.

I was on one of those teams at AWS that nearly everyone at the company relied on; if we went down, everyone was down. encountering some awful people (not naming names). We averaged approximately 30+ high-severity tickets every week, which resulted in some very "eventful" on-call rotations.

Work was hard, hours were long, and I pushed myself beyond what I'd ever done before. I met some great people (some of whom I can say are some of my dearest friends), while also encountering some awful people (not naming names).

I discovered that I was tougher than I ever thought I could be.

I also learned the importance of being kind to myself, and to allow myself to be a work-in-progress. I'm still a work-in-progress, and always will be; we are always in the process of becoming.

I also learned that I needed to allow myself to have a work-life balance. While there are those that will chastise such notions, not allowing that balance will burn you out.

I burnt myself out. I'm still recovering, but I can feel myself breathe lighter every day.

Meditation. Music. Reading. Trying to just remember to be happy in the moment.

Capital One

In November 2022, I started at Capital One as a Software Engineer, at the Senior Associate level. I started working with containerized Springboot applications and Kafka, but have since migrated to Go and AWS Lambda.

I've continued to grow, but at a much more sustainable rate, and I am quite content with my team. While work can sometimes be heavy, my team and company seems to understand that people are overall happier and more productive when they are allowed to live healthy, balanced lives.

Last month, after a big production release, my team had our first big get together. After years of travel restrictions, remote working, and team de-centralization, it was nice to finally see everyone in person.

Surprisingly, not everyone is just a 2D Zoom avatar!

Remote-work jokes aside, my anxiety and introverted nature makes working from home so much easier.

Conclusion

I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to get across with this post, but I felt like typing tonight and see where it went.

Now then, DEV, I need to go to bed. There was a time when I would stay up to all hours of the night to get things done.

That younger version of myself was a fool, and he should go to sleep. Like I will now.