Braindump

#leadership #learning #reflection

During my last vacation I got some unexpected problems in my home lab. The setup, powered by Debian 11, ran the services my family needs reliably for the last 5 years. But it suddenly started having problems, because something got messed up during a PHP update. Short look in the logs didn't surface anything, so while I was on vacation I had to restart the server every 2 days, in order to bring it back to the functional state. After I came back home, I invested multiple hours trying to figure out the root cause. It was really trial and error, because I couldn't pin it down. So after some time I decided to shut the services down, and rebuild everything from scratch using Docker. It took me shorter than expected to bring the services up again, but longer than I thought, to stabilize them 🙂.

So was the invested time worth it? I believe it was, and it brought me more than just a self-hosted setup that respects the privacy rules I want to enforce for family pictures, calendars etc.

Build to gain understanding

We all know that tech is moving at the speed of light. We try to stay informed about the latest developments, in order to be able to do our jobs properly. So we follow numerous blogs, social media accounts, podcasts etc. But being informed is just one part of the equation. Trying stuff by yourself, building something, helps to gain deeper understanding of the technology. It also keeps your problem solving skills sharp, and this is very important in an age where AI provides solutions on a mouse click and our own skills are being used less and less every day.

Understanding as competitive edge

The most influential tech companies today, are led by people who created them as startups. These people managed to grow into their manager (CEO, CTO, ...) roles, while retaining their technical expertise. IMHO this, among other things, gives them the competitive edge over big corporations, where over the past decades the tasks of managers were reduced to tracking budgets, attending meetings, creating presentations, doing performance reviews etc. Not that these things are not important, but all of them can be done also by managers that were not engineers to start with. If you want to keep your own (engineering) competitive edge, start building stuff by yourself.

Avoid the context switch

In order to keep on learning technical stuff, you do not have to e.g. build your own smart home using Home Assistant in your free time. You can keep your engineering skills fresh, by doing code reviews, analyze failed tests, etc. during your work time. But take care, these are dangerous waters. Most of us engineers tend to be fascinated with technical problems, so we spend most of our carriers learning new tech. It takes us time, to accept that leadership skills also need to be learned, if we want to advance ourselves. It is easy, to fall back into the engineer role, because this is fun and interesting. But your team needs you as a leader, there are already engineers in the team. And of course, switching roles means also context switching, not a lot of people can jump from one task to the next, without the mental cost.

What is your opinion about it? I would like to hear about it.