In the past, my posts for various jobs have generally been the result of some curiosity, in the vein of what’s the deal with PATH, the program that formats man pages is HOW old, and what does good password hygiene look like. (Yes, I blogged in my previous life as a content strategist; no, I’m not digging those up right now. Have at it if you want.) My first post for my new job at Nylas (well, newish – I’ve been here almost eight months now) is the result of some longer study, which makes sense. One of the reasons I sought a new job was project longevity and continuity. Working as a consultant exposed me to so many new ideas and situations, but I wanted to see what I’d learn once I got to stay put for a while.
I won’t say every day has been easy, but I will say that I’m really pleased with what I’ve been doing. I get to point at a new program and essentially say “I WANT IT,” and then it’s mine. (It’s helpful when GIMME intersects with your manager’s need to delegate.) Oh, you want Elasticsearch, Breanne? HERE YOU GO. No regrets! I’ve dug deep into the weirdness of AWS IAM, moved a ton of stuff into Terraform and set our style guidelines for what good Terraform looks like, made my first EU AWS resources, learned some Ansible, got to apply Python to systems management with Boto, weirded out with Bash, and gotten better acquainted with monitoring. I’m chuffed.
A thing I gave the team in return is structure. In my work post, for obvious reasons, I didn’t go deeply into what I had previously learned that was useful here. However… what I’d previously learned was incredibly useful here. I became fatigued from new situation after new situation, but it was incredibly gratifying to get to use those same skills to make a comfortable, regular set of meetings and other expectations that I actually got to benefit from in the long term. It felt good to start good sprint planning, standups, and retros for clients, but it felt amazing to make them with myself and my ongoing teammates as the beneficiaries of this stuff. And do you know, I was pretty good at it after going through the process several times before. Fortunately, I worked with people who trusted me – and, perhaps even more important, made it clear that this was not exclusively my job and would not be solely my responsibility as time marched on. It is not extremely surprising, I think, that after setting all of this up and spreading responsibility across the team… I’m backing off the glue work for a bit, because the structure is in place for me to computer more exclusively. I’m very excited.
It also pleases me that this is all essentially another kind of automation. I love automating infra stuff – fully automated deploys and regular checks on systems and updating spreadsheets and all of the boring stuff that computers can do better than we can. What I wanted here was essentially automation in interactions, a regular cadence of events that freed us from having to reinvent structure unnecessarily, so we all had set expectations and were free to focus on the things we actually care about, that do require human interaction and innovation. I’m happy to say that it worked.
I wrote this post in part because I was proud of what I did and wanted to say so publicly. However, I also wrote it because I know the problems I had – meetings without set structure, unclear expectations between teams, irregular schedules that cause more confusion than they cure – are very common, and I hope this post helps even one other person set themselves free from another agendaless meeting, to remember that there’s something better on the other side. I’ll see you there, timer in hand, politely reminding everyone that lunch is soon, and we’d best wrap it up.