2017: A year in review
A few years ago when I was doing client work, we would regularly host clients’ sites and apps for them. During this time, I was responsible for both development and keeping them up and running as much as possible. Most of the money being in new development, it was difficult to assign priority to improving the operations of existing applications. In this period, I wanted an “operations person” to teach me how to make new applications that would need minimal operations support from the beginning. Failing this, I decided to become “the operations person” myself.
Following that decision, I found myself working at BizReach on the infrastructure team for HRMOS, a Software-as-a-Service product focused on applicant tracking for medium to large enterprises, in the end of 2016. Following that job, I then went to a small startup, dely, as a Site Reliability Engineer for their flagship product Kurashiru, a recipe video app for iOS and Android.
This is the first full year I’ve been working full-time as a dedicated infrastructure / operations / SRE / DevOps engineer, and I feel like I’ve grown a lot. On the technical side, I was able to lead the migration of complex legacy monolith systems to scalable and resilient independent systems. On the not-so-technical side, I’ve experienced different types of company cultures, managerial styles, and I’ve gotten accustomed to working with teams of engineers – the experience I’ve had up until this year was mostly working in extremely small teams.
While I do have a passion for making, maintaining, and improving services, I am also very interested in company culture – what makes it and what breaks it – especially when it comes to remote work. I believe most technical engineering work can be done as efficiently (if not more) remote, but there are definite challenges that need to be addressed before I can start leading a change in any position I’m in.
Here’s to 2018! 🎉