It’s 2024 and I’ve made some big changes.
After 7 years in engineering leadership, I’ve requested to shift to being a very senior engineer in my organization. During my term in engineering leadership, I:
- Was the CTO of a 50 person startup (successfully acquired)
- The senior backend director of a major media company
- Most importantly, I grew a ton by coming to Plaid and being a line manager in Platform, then a Lead of Leads in Platform, followed by a Tech Lead Manager of the Storage Team.
Why am I ‘holding the career ladder upside down’? It’s to extract the most mutual value… by providing value for my org while also continuing growing in a manner and direction of my choosing.
I’ve gotten to the point where leading teams is no longer interesting and challenging, but building technology is interesting and challenging with plenty of room to grow.
I shifted from being the TLM of Storage, to a senior staff member of Storage and will find my next focus internally once we complete our ambitious projects of 2024.
In the meantime, I’m spending my time automating our processes and helping the team move faster. The major leverage there has been in designing a system of dynamic runbooks to execute the 200+ steps needed to move a service to a new online storage platform with ~90s of write traffic interruption.
In smaller news, I’m having fun coding and building again!
In support of my team:
- I forked and added support for Resource Groups in TiDB to the mysql terraform provider which we’ll upstream when it has baked in.
- I figured out the type exchange of FFI in deno so that I could create a library for exec’ing processes exec.
- I re-built a favorite tool of mine as tome-cli after using tome for a few years in production.
- I maintain my own package management system based off of cash-app’s hermit which lives at packages.
- I’m contributing back to upstream projects to patch bugs or improve usability (tiup & dagu)
- I’ll be presenting about TiDB at HTAP Summit in Sept 2024.