I got a cold-call from a recruiter today, seeing if I’d be interested in a Technical Manager job. That’s right in my bailiwick: I tend to be more technical than most technical managers, but she had me pegged in the right general zone of job, anyway. What surprised me was her saying she had a resume of mine from 2006. Wow.
Luckily for me, 2006 rang a bell. That’s the year my son was born, so that’s the year I traded a commute around the Beltway to a job I loved for a new series of adventures with a company closer to home.
In 2006.. I was building an e-commerce system using Struts. I _think_ we were debating a rewrite in Struts 2. Somewhere in that time frame, I became a certified Scrum practitioner. (I’ve since let the certified part of that lapse, though I’d still consider myself a Scrum practitioner. Just one who doesn’t pay certification fees to prove her worth.) We’d do production deployments once a week, beginning at 11pm and working through the night until we succeeded or rolled back.
Since then, I’ve done all sorts of things… OSGi in its relatively early days. Grails web applications that I helped take GOSS (government open-source) and then fully open-sourced. D3 visualizations for SBIRs. Actually, D3 visualizations for two different SBIRs. Many hours realizing I needed to better grok D3. Lots of business development. Winning multiple proposals and then staffing teams to do the technical delivery. Where those teams typically included me, hands-on coding. Ramping up on AngularJS and Node to lead a “thin-client” team. That’s as opposed to the program’s thick-client team building on top of Java Swing – thankfully, although I managed the overall UI team, didn’t have to wade too far into the Swing code. Docker containers containing stub implementations of enterprise system interfaces we wanted vendors to be able to execute against. Now Kubernetes: figuring out how to deliver and sustain systems in a cloud. I’ve delivered two OSCON briefings, one using an Arduino and C and one using Go and a Raspberry Pi.
It’s been a fun 10 years. If she calls again, though, she’d better go find my updated resume. For the record, LinkedIn’s got a pretty good idea of what I’ve been up to…