Part 5 brings the series to a close. I’ll share what I’ve learned since my startup was acquired by American Express — adapting to a bigger company and a broader role.
Part 4 of this series explores my third job — working as an engineer, architect, and a few other roles at a small fintech startup.
In Part 3 of this series I’ll discuss lessons from my second job. I was now a Senior Software Engineer, working on a whole new set of problems and building full applications from scratch for the first time.
Earlier this year I started writing about the different experiences and lessons that have shaped my career journey. This post is Part 2 of the series and I’ll walk through some of the things I learned at my first job.
One of the most common questions I get in my role is “what do I need to do to get a high level individual contributor (IC) role?”. It’s a question I’ve generally struggled to answer, partly because the folks that I have worked with in these roles often have very different responsibilities. Some are more hands on, some are on the edge of being people leaders. To me these roles are always a bit more nebulous than traditional developer roles, and that can be part of the challenge of being in one.
I’ve switched to using a Mac at home for my my day to day computing and developement. One of the applications I missed from Linux was the now discontinued Nuvola Player. It’s a simple desktop application that wraps the websites of several popular cloud-based music players and provides a native desktop experience to them. One of the things I don’t like about cloud-based music players is that my multimedia keys don’t work with them, and this app provides a solution.
One of the things I wanted to set up when I created French Press was the ability for the blog to automatically pull new posts from GitHub when I committed them to the repo. To do this I have set up an endpoint in my Express application to listen for an HTTP request, and trigger a ‘git pull’ command. The code checks for a query string parameter set to a secret key so that I don’t have to worry about someone trigger pull requests without me knowing.
After creating French Press and migrating my site to Node.js, I realized I needed to setup Node on my actual web server. Here’s some info on what steps were involved.
As an introduction to Node.js for myself I’ve decided to write my own blog engine.
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