Career path
Twenty years, seven jobs, one recurring lesson I keep having to learn again.
Each of these gets one line on what it actually taught me, which is not always what it says on the résumé. The full version is on LinkedIn, where it is duller.
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2022 — now
Principal Engineer · Fall Forward
Data architecture for a white-label communications platform. What I learned: the multi-tenant decision you make in month two is the one you are still paying for in year four, so write down why.
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2018 — 2022
Staff Engineer · mid-size SaaS
Led the migration nobody wanted. What I learned: the hard part of a migration is never the code, it is convincing eleven people that the current thing is worse than they have got used to.
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2015 — 2018
Backend Lead · a startup that no longer exists
First time managing. What I learned: I am a better engineer when I am explaining something than when I am doing it alone, which took an embarrassingly long time to notice.
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2012 — 2015
Senior Engineer · agency work
Thirty client projects in three years. What I learned: you can tell within an hour whether a codebase was built by people who were allowed to say no.
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2009 — 2012
Engineer · healthcare systems
Integrations with software older than I was. What I learned: read the protocol spec before the library docs. The library is somebody’s opinion about the spec.
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2006 — 2009
Sysadmin, then developer · small ISP
Where the DNS thing started. What I learned: if you are the person who gets called, you find out how systems actually fail rather than how they are documented to fail.