My blog has been dormant, where have I been?

Busy! With my professional life and personal life. Big and good things on both fronts.

Since I last wrote:

• I led a 50 person startup in manufacturing as the CTO using Elixir and Typescript
• I led the development of a SaaS product as their Sr. Director of Engineering (Python, Elixir, Typescript, Graphql, and REST)
• I built and ran an open source app in production that streams mutations in MongoDB to Postgresql called Moresql
• We used Moresql to transition a company from MongoDB to Postgresql.
• I spent a lot of time with my cats
• I refined my bash coding style, evidence in my dotfiles
• I’ve lived in 3 distinctly different places and I’ve gotten to do some traveling
• I’ve been fully remote in remote and colocated companies since 2013

I haven’t written about my engineering leadership experiences because it’s hard to sufficiently abstract them in the moment in a way that I can publicly write about. I’ll see if that changes in the future because I want to be able to share learnings, since my professional growth is so very important to me.

I recently put up two pull requests for a commandline tool written in Rust called Tome. Tome is a rust binary tool that helps make a folder of scripts re-usable for one or more people so that it has good user ergonomics. My pull requests are https://github.com/toumorokoshi/tome/pull/4 and https://github.com/toumorokoshi/tome/pull/5.

With three days of Rust, my impressions are as follows:

• The compiler teaches me the language, through useful error messages
• Some types are obvious (Option/Result types) while others (String vs str and borrowed version) need me to investigate to understand
• Cross compiling isn’t as user friendly as golang but is working now that I took time to set it up
• All my favorite commandline tools are moving into Rust, perhaps I should too!

If you see me and want good conversation starters:

• Ask me about using Trello as a columnular data store
• About moving from MongoDB to Postgres (thanks JSONB)
• About what my best purchases were during covid

In 2021, I’m looking forward to:

• Learning and growing technically (Rust?)
• Getting good at a few things outside software engineering.
• Spending more time outdoors.
• Traveling to see friends.

It’s 2021, I’m happy and have challenges to work on :).