This developer portal is about exploring the world of software engineering and showcasing different aspects of building a minimalist microservice architecture!

Programming is an act of giving a machine some instructions so it can perform things repeatedly.

Software engineering is an act of programming and everything else that goes along with it in order to deliver enterprise software to production.

I have been at my current company long enough to get too comfortable, but is that the case?

The years I have spent in my current job feel very much like 3–4 jobs. The company went through different of senior leaderships roughly every 4 years. On top of that, there is the technology aspect and its changes over the years, and different types of projects I have been part of. All of these things painted a picture in my head as if I changed jobs 3–4 times.

What is the secret to still getting “New Employee” jitters every week even after being with the company for so long? What is the secret to challenging yourself?

(1) Don’t wait for your leaders to challenge you. You need to challenge yourself from week to week.

(2) You need to care.

(3) Appreciate what you and your team accomplished, but never be fully satisfied; there is still a balance to this. Look at this from a positive angle. Look at it as an opportunity.

(4) Don’t judge somebody else’s engineering efforts that you inherited; you don’t know what circumstances they performed that under. Instead focus that energy to try to understand it, identify what can be improved and improve it; this will keep you on the edge because improving something you inherited is harder than just building it from scratch because you might not have an option to build it from scratch. You will learn how to plan it and improve it incrementally.

(5) Create a great team so that you are in a room with a group of people who are smarter than you. For example, as a solutions architect and a software engineering leader I may be the one making final decisions (if necessary) on designs/solutions, but every day I learn something new from my teammates and that’s a great feeling.

All of this adds a bit of that uncertainty and a new boost of energy from week to week. This is enough to still get a bit of “New Employee” jitters that make us prove ourselves over and over again.