A second year of writing on the internet
This is post #75 - meaning I’ve written 42 posts this year! 🥂
A fantastic year
✨ The past year had a ton of exciting things going on, led first and foremost by starting a shiny new job! Despite having nominally the same job (sales engineer), it’s been a huge change to move from a large subsidiary of a much larger company to a startup. A few thoughts …
🚀 I had no idea what to expect in joining a high-growth startup. It feels like my day-to-day changes every few weeks and it’s an intoxicating thrill.
🤝 All of that growth meant a bunch of interviewing for peers and colleagues in other functions and for my (now a whole team!) manager. This meant an opportunity to learn a ton more about how to do this effectively, having to do more interviews than in previous roles with a large team to share the load.
🎤 Spoke at four public conferences! About four completely different things too!
- A gentle introduction to container escapes and no-clump gravy at PancakesCon 5 - this was a fantastically fun and unique conference to talk about both real-life hobbies (cooking!) and cybersecurity topics geared more towards entry level folks. It’s the sort of event that I wish existed when I was getting started and so amazingly inclusive for attendees.
- Whodunnit? A git repo mystery at BSides Boulder 2024 talks through many of my attempts to figure out who did what, when, where, and why in a git repository (and some lessons learned, too).
- Participated in a panel at Black Hat 2024 partner event about how devops has always been about Secure by Design software. Having worked with development teams in highly-regulated industries through several iterations of “devops”, it’s easy to forget that building, testing, and deploying frequently has a ton of benefits - security is the first of them.
- Directly related to work, my teammate and I spoke at DAFITC 2024 about the technology of what we do as a company (slides as presented). This talk was one where I really felt like I’d grown as a sales engineer to tell a compelling technical story, guide folks through common stumbling points, and provide plenty of space for the audience to go wherever is most interesting to them.
With some harsh lessons
📉 Being in a business unit that isn’t a priority to the company is a terrible place to be for career growth. Transitioning from a business priority to a cost center was rough, even if it took a while. I took to that change poorly and felt stuck. There are many ways to get “unstuck”, but they all require you to do something about it.
🪴 The opportunity you want may not be open to you. No one will stop you from going above and beyond, but there’s a decent chance you won’t ever be rewarded for it at your job. There’s only so much budget, so many positions on <shiny new project>, so much room for engineers doing task, etc. That’s not to say that the work isn’t intrinsically valuable to you, to your community, and to the future you want to live in. Be clear on why it matters to you for your own good.
🎭 Imposter syndrome is forever. Leaving a job is kinda scary. It’s comforting to know where things were and who did what, but more importantly, I’d already “proved myself”. Stop listening to that voice, then have fun learning.
🌲 Eight months since leaving my old role, the work I’ve done with actions-runner-controller architecture is still some of the popular pages on this site. I’m not fond of prioritizing “evergreen” content because it makes me scared of not being able to grow or learn past “Natalie knows lots of weird GitHub things”. I’ll always know lots of arcane incantations and obscure trivia about how it works in regulated environments - maybe even things that GitHub still doesn’t really know about GitHub. 🙃
And a bright future
🏃🏻♀️➡️ Stop attacking the hill. Roughly this time a year ago, I was getting back into running after some terrible shin splints. There’s a steep gravel hill on my route, which I normally run uphill. Once I switched to running it both ways, the downhill was awful. Another regular on that path gave a little unsolicited advice - “stop attacking the hill” by being so tense and let gravity carry me down. I can’t control the hill (or a lot of life/work/existence), but letting go of the stress prevents that injury and leaves energy to keep moving forward.
🌀 You can never go back. The person you were and the place you left is no more. I was a bit blindsided when a long-time friend told me I’d changed a lot from when we’d worked together several roles ago (hopefully for the better). Jobs change you. Companies and teams change too. It’s too small to notice day to day, but in keeping in touch with folks from several of my prior roles as we’ve moved or haven’t reinforces that. Even the folks who became “comeback kids” into their former roles say things have changed and maybe that’s a good thing. 💖
📝 Not changing the blog template or static site generator is great to make it easy to just write things down. This is probably why, despite being busier than ever, this habit has stuck. The temptation to play with other tools hasn’t gone away though …
🌱 It is deeply gratifying to be learning something new every single day. I’m excited to see what year three of learning in public going to look like!
🤖 I’m still having fun making AI filters of pictures I’ve taken. This one is of dwarf/mini daffodils I planted a few years ago. They only stand perhaps 4 inches tall. They’ll reliably come up before anything else each year and are a delight to see in a sea of still-dead brown grass as a start to spring.