Reflections

Today I wanted to write about something that happens to me at work all the time: the process of asking for technical help, helps me discover the answer to my question. For example, today I was stuck on some terraform config that wasn’t showing some of the changes I was expecting to see in the diff. I decided to start writing a message in a support channel. As I was writing the message I started thinking about whether I had covered all the bases of things that I could check on before bothering someone to help me on something I could have done myself. At that point, it occured to me that I hadn’t checked a specific file that might have some releveant information. So, I deleted my half typed message, checked the file, and voila! The reason my config wasn’t applying was because I forgot to explicitly add some variables. ...

Interviewing for other jobs in tech can make you a more competent engineer. My premise for this argument is that when you prepare an interview for a new role you need to prepare to answer questions, technical and non-technical, in a domain that is different from your day to day work. This forces you to step out of your daily work and read and think about different domains and technologies. During the interview process you will get an idea of how well you performed, whether that is via self reflection, or feedback from the emloyer. This gives you a pretty good idea of where you are lacking knowledge and a good direction of where to focus next. ...