Note #000: New Year's Resolution: Boring Engineering Notes
Unrequested notes from a Software Engineering journey
For many of us, the last few days of December are usually self-reflection days: it’s when we try to asses what went well and what didn’t go as well as we initially planned during the last 12 months. It’s also time for the infamous New Year’s Resolution, when we set some goals for the next 12 months doing some very “accurate” planning whose complexity resembles the process leading to some company yearly OKRs.
For many of us though, the first few days of January is already when all plans start to fall down, turning Resolutions into Desolations :)
Earlier today I was having breakfast with some friends when one of them asked:
So, what is your goal for the New Year?
I was planning to start a blog / newsletter for a while now and I intended to make it my Resolution for 2023: I started to compile a list of topics and titles, plus some mental planning on how to write and release the whole thing.
As everything new though, the hardest part is always the first step: I knew what I wanted to do and how to do it, but I had no plan on when and how to start it (nor a good name for the project, of course).
So, I used my friend’s question (thank you, Davide!) as a trigger to pick a (shitty) name and kick this off.
2022; small recap
2022 has been a very interesting year for me: I joined KongHQ as a Senior Software Engineer in a newly formed team working at the heart of the company’s SaaS product.
The excitement for this new challenge, plus the quality of the people I’m surrounded by at my new role, gave me a boost of energy pushing me to grow a lot in the last 12 months.
Something that I did more than ever is writing.
Regardless of the end product (and regardless of its quality), I’ve never written as much as in the past year:
countless of lines of code
countless of PR reviews
several design docs
On top of that, I’ve also read a tons of books, design docs and blog posts, and I found myself writing even more notes for myself about these for my own benefit.
Apparently, they say that improving your writing skills makes you an overall better communicator, which makes you a better engineer too. I don’t consider myself a great communicator, plus my English skills are inversely proportional to the amount of hours I’ve been awake during the day, so I thought that deciding to start a newsletter could be a good way to improve on multiple dimensions at the same time.
2023; driving the path
But, what am I going to write about in this effort?
Other than writing a lot in the past year, I’ve also reflected a lot on my role and on my career trajectory. Overall, I consider January 2023-self a much more deliberate engineer than my January 2022-self. What I mean is that I’m intentionally more conscious of the choices that I take on my daily role, which ultimately are the decisions shaping one’s career in the long run.
One thing that I was lucky to learn early on in my career is that you cannot drive your career in autopilot mode. You not only have to choose the direction for your journey, you also need to be in the driver seat constantly adjusting the direction and speed based on internal signals (e.g. mental and physical health, current life priorities etc) and external signals (e.g. align yourself with your team / company needs etc).
Despite being aware of this, the seat or the ride sometimes may get too comfortable, leading to let the road drive yourself. In that case, you can either find yourself landing on a good or not so good spot, but in either cases you will need to do some extra effort to get back to the intended path.
In order to avoid the above scenario, we need to be more deliberate about the type of engineers we want to be and the direction we want to take.
The goal that I want to achieve this newsletter / blog is to 2-folds:
for myself: I want this to be a reminder to never settle and be more deliberate in my day-to-day job
for readers: helping others providing key learnings from my daily experiences
Here I will be sharing strategies, ideas and personal reflections that can be used (and that I am personally using) to help navigate the daily job as Software Engineers, aiming at being more conscious of our current roles and the ones we aim to obtain in the future.
Nice one Gabriele :) leaving a comment so that...
1) I'll remind you owe us more articles!
2) I'll remind myself this is the inspiration I need :)
Nice idea!
In any case I enjoy the 'shitty' name 😂
GL🍀 and keep writing bro! I wait the next part!