Start of Something New
Starting a tech blog project sharing real world experiences from a high growth, fast paced software development environment in the fintech domain
As a new year starts, many people reflect on how things have been going. Was it a good year? Is there something that should change in the next one?
This kind of reflection resulted in setting up a new personal goal for me to start a tech blog.
I have been thinking about this idea numerous times in the past. Until now, my self-doubt convinced me time and time again there is nothing worth sharing. Roughly a year ago, I started journaling and realized over time — boy — there are lots of interesting stories to share.
I have been working in the IT industry for over ten years now. Most of the time, over seven years, I have been on a roller coaster journey with Mambu — a core banking service provider handling financial transactions for millions of end customers in over 60 countries. I have seen this company grow from a small startup of 50 to 1K employees. Every single year, I felt like changing the company and role since I had to adapt to change constantly. Over time I have seen job descriptions change from generalists to specialists. When I joined Mambu, I was a junior software engineer and IT admin. Besides coding on the customer portal, I was issuing invoices to customers every Friday and helping new joiners set up their hardware by enabling encryption for their hard drives and explaining how to use a password manager. My passion for agile principles led to a one-year detour as an agile coach before I started to level through the software engineer ranks up to Staff Engineer (Tech Lead). Now, together with the Identity and Access Management team, I am ensuring that all traffic reaching Mambu’s APIs is authenticated and authorized for billions of requests every year.
At the Staff Engineer level, public speaking and writing become somewhat expected. Like so many engineers, I have neglected this so far. A big motivation for this blog comes from my intrinsic wish to be a better communicator, create meaningful connections in the tech community, and get feedback from outside my bubble.
If I write down the goal publicly, the goal turns into a personal commitment and I become much more likely to achieve it. So here we go:
Every month in 2024, I will publish an article on my tech blog.
Expect me to write about the most challenging projects I had the chance to work on like scaling a high-load API gateway, introducing API Rate Limiting, breaking a monolith to microservices, and how to achieve operational excellence with an on-call team. You will also read about startup stories, agile methodologies, book reviews, career advice, and how to handle remote work efficiently. So lots of things to cover!
I would love for you to help me bootstrap this little blog by subscribing and sharing the news with your friends and colleagues interested in all things tech.
Happy New Year! 🎆