The biggest boon to my software career

TL;DR: I show my appreciation and respect for three individuals who have had a significant impact on my professional journey.

So, I’ve floundered around for maybe two weekends by now, trying to compile and articulate how a few individuals have impacted my growth and career in the past year. I’m opting to scrap my previous attempts and keep this short and pointed. I also want to callout that there is so much more than I could recollect and capture in this short post, so I don’t want this to be misconstrued as complete.

Kyle

@kylemac is my director.

Kyle has been the best manager I’ve had in my career. Despite technically being my director, he’s given me some of the most actionable feedback and helpful guidance which I’ve done my part in by listening to, acting upon, and incorporating into my daily work.

And because I work in close proximity to him, I’ve also been fortunate to learn a great deal of soft skills from him simply through observation and osmosis.

Hearing bits and pieces of his vision in our biweekly one-on-ones has also helped me to stay focused and excited about what I am working on, and to me, this is huge.

Bryce

@brkalow is my peer and tech lead on my immediate team.

Bryce has been a guiding example of what "brilliance" looks like. I think Bryce and I share a lot of similar technology interests and he has really helped to kick my existing skillset into the next gear, and then some.

I’ve attempted to follow suit in his ability to multi-thread multiple workstreams, while also being extremely thorough and detail-oriented... I still work on this everyday.

More actively, Bryce has also pushed me in various ways such as encouraging me to have career-critical conversations with my managers, and has challenged me and held me accountable in code-reviews and written documents.

Brandon

@BrandonRRomano is my peer and another tech lead.

Brandon has helped me grow in many ways, both subtle (like quite literally my English skills... and I’m a native-ish speaker) and obvious (how I evaluate technical decisions), to the point that it is hard to pinpoint them all and actually requires a lot of effort to recollect.

There is an aspect of explicitness to Brandon's project management style and written and spoken communications that I know I continually try to emulate, because it’s so effective and beneficial, and especially so in a remote work environment.

Closing

I originally wanted to focus on the appreciation aspect but found that I was either boasting about myself excessively or that the tone of writing was drifting towards something like an annual peer-review (eww). So I forced myself to keep this short.

It’s quite a lot of effort to keep these types of thoughts concise without feeling like I'm descrediting or excluding people’s actual efforts and impact. There is also so much nuance behind each relationship that it is impossible to capture it all, even the most meaningful bits, in a paragraph or two.

If I wanted to reflect on anything it would be... Without these folks, I wouldn’t have hit the strides that I did in the past year, and want to thank them for keeping work exciting, fun, and real.