A Shift in Direction

What am I up to lately? A bit of everything!

I'm really enjoying my work on a cross-functional team with Climate Corporation. My team ensures that scientists and researchers doing statistics work have all the compute resources they need - compute nodes, developer environments on a variety of platforms, data storage, and support for best practices. So I've worked on everything from laptop support to cloud provisioning to data structure planning and custom software, with more variety yet to come.

The first 20 years of my career were heavily focused on web development. Eventually I wanted a break from that, and the area I'd enjoyed the most was data science.  I don't have the formal statistics training (yet) to participate directly, but I could easily slide into a developer role closely related to and supporting that work.  That would give me a way to learn more about the field, and decide if I wanted to train into it long-term.  So that's what I was looking for when I found this role, and the role was a perfect fit.

I hadn't predicted how much the role would cross over into other teams, overlapping a bit with laptop support, and a bit with Operations activities, as well as having its own dev side too.  But now that I'm into it, I'm loving the experience and variety.  It makes good use of my broad skill set as well as my specialty knowledge, and the teams I support are also the teams I'm enjoying learning from.

Shaking up my set of tools and coding goals has triggered a paradigm shift in how I think about code and my role in systems and solutions.  Using many languages (and usually not the one I'm most familiar with!) is making me think more carefully about concepts separately from implementation, which is leading to better plans.  I may not even know which programming language I'll be using for implementation, when I'm planning an architecture.  It's a polyglot environment, and I create a lot of different things with different contexts, using whichever language is the best fit for that situation and team.  It's not unusual for me to touch 3-5 languages in a day.  It has also broadened my understanding of how to approach some of my personal free-time projects, giving me insights into hard problems that are more easily solved with some frameworks than with others.

Away from work, I'm volunteering as a mentor for CoderGirl, to get beginner developers trained and ready to go through LaunchCode's apprenticeship to jobs program.  The learners are doing great, and it's excellent fun and rewarding professional leadership experience for me.

As a part of this, I'm writing a beginner's course in Java (as a MOOC), and using it with my CoderGirl learners.  Despite the work-in-progress nature of the course, I already have 450+ people using it (both CoderGirls and random people online) and giving feedback about it, which has been so valuable for improving it as I go.  I'm applying agile concepts to the course creation (work in small increments, ship often, get feedback) and it's working out great.  I hope to finish the material for the first course sometime in the next few months, and get it fully published and made public then.  Producing the video course has been a tremendous learning experience for me as well, most clearly evident in an improvement in my public speaking skills.  (If you're training for public speaking, I highly recommend captioning and editing your own videos for a while!)

In summary, I'm doing interesting, varied work, serving a field that I am loving learning more about, and it's been fun getting out of the pigeon-hole of web dev.  Data science is fascinating.  And, yes - I've started the process of studying statistics (still beginner though!).