A valuable lesson passed on to me by a mentor from my early career can be summarized in a quick phrase: "[the] programming language is an implementation detail..."
This notion reminds me that while technology is integral, it's just one component of creating great software.
True excellence encompasses much more than the tools we use, although its often easy to get lost in the allure of benchmarks and emerging trends.
Similarly, selecting technology or making architectural decisions based solely on what is familiar and comfortable can lead to untold challenges.
Therefore, I believe in and strive to impress upon my team mates the importance of thoughtful, pragmatic, data driven decision-making.
Central to this approach is ensuring alignment within the team, minimizing distractions, and providing the necessary resources for execution.
It's about fostering an environment where excellence can thrive.
In service of this, I advocate for the implementation of Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
While the term may not always have been in use, I've consistently promoted the concept in my previous roles, and now in-name for the last 5-6 years.
Establishing clear, shared standards for what constitutes "good" in our products or services is crucial for team success and organizational growth.
It's a collective effort that uplifts everyone involved, and helps create a shared vision of what we're aiming for.
I've seen the impact of SLOs go far beyond a single product team and become a common currency for understanding the reliability of an ecosystem as a whole,
balancing the wants and needs of many teams and creating shared understanding of the health of products across tech teams and engineering adjacent teams (e.g. design, product)
I have a great deal many more thoughts to share but I'll leave it here for now while I continue to consider pondering whether its worth the effort of creating a blog here. :)
In so far as the technology I am familiar with, and admitedly what I'd choose by default if there were no other prevailing factors,
I'm a polyglot software engineer familiar with many languages but most often reach for Golang.
I've done plenty of work building frontends in TypeScript (and JavaScript), and using Python for midsize task automation.
I have some professional experience with PHP and Ruby as well, and I'm learning Rust on in my spare time and really excited about what I've learned so far.
Generally I reached for compiled languages as well as other tools that help
shift errors "left" earlier into the software development lifecycle.
Of course software needs to be distributed in some fashion in order to me useful outside of "my machine". Beyond just being great tech, you could say I owe a lot to Docker, it's what got my interest in DevOps started way back in 2016, and what got me thinking about codifying operations problems (I actually was a Docker Accredited Consultant in 2017).
Quickly (and unoriginally) I realized that having my software in this nice distributable package (Docker image) was great but I needed tools to deploy those . Naturally I got in Kuberenetes and Terraform to build the clusters and surrounding infrastructure to deploy all those beautiful clusters to. After few years of practice and I would later get the to build and maintain high stakes Kubernetes infrastructure and CI/CD at The Home Depot, and follow my manager from my time there to build multi-national, multi-tenant, hybrid cloud systems at Yodlee.