My Next Ten Years

I was recently attending DockerCon and Michael Ellison, CEO of Codepath, was giving a talk about the future of Computer Science education. He was telling a story about how he was recently in a room with a large number of CTOs and asked how many of them started programming before the age of 14. He mentioned that around 90% of them raised their hands. I let out an audible chuckle, turned to the person next to me and said “Well time to change careers, looks like I’ll never be a CTO.” While being a CTO isn’t the end all be all of a Software Engineer’s career path, I do believe it is a very desirable outcome. Later on, as I was back at my hotel, I was thinking about when I had started learning to program and it dawned on me that it has been about five years since the spring quarter of my Freshman year at Oregon State University. I started reminiscing on all I had learned over the past five years and decided I wanted to write a brief summary of my journey to becoming a Software Engineer and what I hope to accomplish moving forward.

My Next Ten Years:

The first area I would like to learn more about is Functional Programming and Elixir / Erlang. As you’ve read, I started out with Object Oriented languages all the way back in my freshman year of college with Java and have been working in them ever since. While Ruby and JavaScript do contain many Functional Programming concepts, which I frequently use, I believe having a strong understanding of at least one functional language would allow me to think about programming in a new lens. With that, I’m totally enamored with Elixir. First and foremost, I’ve found the Elixir community to be amazing. People are always tweeting interesting things with #myelixirstatus, community leaders are active in Slack, and the number of books and resources to learn the language is growing every day. I've spent time on small side projects many times, but I recently starting building out an idea I had. Development is much slower than if I had chosen to use Rails, but I find the chance to learn and grow as a great opportunity!

Another area I have a lot of interest in is DevOps / Docker / Go. As the re-platforming effort happened, all the engineers were introduced to Docker to some degree. For the first few years I really didn’t spend any time learning about Docker; whenever I needed to fix something in a Dockerfile, I had no idea what any of the commands meant and I had to read the docs all over again. It was frustrating to try to fix the issue and it would end up taking much longer that I would have liked. Recently I started spending more reading and learning about Docker and I feel that the containerization movement will continue to grow.

Finally, it’s very likely that I will continue to work with Ruby on Rails and in doing so I’m hoping that I can continue to learn and write about my experiences. I have a ton of ideas in my head about things I’ve learned throughout my careers that I could write about, I just need to sit down and start flushing them out.

With that said, I’ll wrap this up and get started on the next post by saying thank you for coming along this little trip down memory lane with me. Hopefully another ten years down the road I’ll be able to reflect on this post and see if my areas of interest ended up aligning with my actual career.