2020

It’s 2021, but in some ways it still feels like 2020.

The last year or so was probably the least favorite part of my professional career as a Software Engineer. Pandemic and US politics aside, it’s the year that software engineering became purely transactional.

Gone were “coffee walks”, casual lunches, brainstorming on a whiteboard. Every email and nearly every chat or video call was about getting something, either me requesting help or resources, or someone else requesting help or resources from me.

I thought about quitting - going as far to take nearly 8 weeks off, updating my LinkedIn, and trying out a few different digital courses on Udacity/Udemy. Ultimately, (and somewhat ironically) I was promoted during that same time for prior work, and ended up moving from a UI infrastructure TL role to a full-stack TL/M role in a consumer-facing product.

Some things about this new job make me really excited - new faces, new technical (and people) challenges, some make me anxious - being responsible for others performance reviews and the bureaucracy that comes with that; and others are already a bit scary - like the chaotic nature of parts of my larger org and the fast growing nature of both the team and product.

I relaunched my blog, with this post, to find more avenues to express what I’ve been doing and thinking about, and as a forcing function to get myself to write more. Please hold me accountable :)

~ Matan