Welcome!

It's taken a long time for me to finally get myself to start a blog, but I'm happy to be here. I hope you are too! I wanted to take a little bit of time to explain why I've started a blog.

Lately, I've become very interested in career growth. With all of the layoffs happening this year, plus the general uncertainty that we all experienced throughout the pandemic, I think we all can agree that more proactive planning and positioning can go a long way. I spent a lot of time in my career focused only on building hard skills. And, I'm still doing a lot of this skill building today - I'm currently bashing through LeetCode problems as I look towards securing an engineering role at Netflix (or some equivalent) one day. But, as any veteran in their field will tell you, the soft skills are just as important, if not sometimes more important than the hard skills.

The past few years, my soft skills have grown immensely. I believe this has given me a new edge in my pursuits. It has been a challenge, but I would implore anybody that faces that challenge to jump head first into it and figure out how to swim. It will benefit you much more in the long term.

I feel that creating this blog is my latest challenge on that journey. It's the next level. I could see that challenge coming for a while, but I couldn't determine why I needed to travel that path until recently. Here's what helped me decide that it was the right time:

1. I Want To Help Whoever I Can

I want to help those who are seeking a path in the same industries that I am pursuing.

I was recently given a book to read, and I believe this book had a wonderful message. It's called "The Go-Giver", and you can find it here. I really enjoyed what this book had to say, not only because it outlined a path to personal success, but it also validated something that I already knew, but couldn't explain. To paraphrase it:

The most effective way to achieve success is to provide as much value as possible to as many people as possible.

In our society, this makes a lot of sense. The reason that you buy something is because it has value to you. You pay rent because there's value in having a place to live. You buy nice clothes because there's value in keeping up appearances. You pay to see a movie because there's value in relieving a bit of stress by stepping away from real life and being entertained. But think of the other side of that equation. Think of the success of the landlords that own apartment buildings. Think of the success of Nike or Dior. Think of the success of Disney or Warner. If you want some success, you need to be able to provide value to someone. If you want to become someone that is very successful, you need to be able to provide value to as many people as you possibly can. Value and Impact.

With this being understood, I realized that I have the value, but lacked the impact. Most of the code I've written may have only helped a dozen people. Maybe 100 at the most. Maybe a few thousand if it was customer facing, like on one project where we integrated Google Maps API into a location search page. But at the end of the day, nobody using that page knows my name or my contribution.

I'm looking for a way to change that.

2. I Need To Document My Experiences

How many people do you know have pursued a career in both tech and entertainment? Especially from an entrepreneurial perspective? Is this because nobody else wants to pursue this path, or because nobody else thinks they can?

If there's any value that I know I can provide, it's outlining how I got to where I am, and describing what it was like. Of course I can talk about more low level concepts. There's plenty of code to write, tests to run, music to record. That work never goes away. But I also think it's valuable to describe how software engineering and film production are similar ideologies. I think it's important to describe what you may experience the first time that you run a film production. I think it's important to describe what to avoid the first time that you outsource React and Node development work for a new Proof-Of-Concept.

"When One Teaches, Two Learn".

3. I Need To Build An Audience

You may start to see how this all comes together. I have a lot of big ideas. Too many, I'm sure many would say. I'm not somebody that is discouraged by difficulty. Solving problems is not a chore for me, I enjoy it. I attribute this to the Lego sets my mother bought me as a child. I have been building this problem-solving mindset for a long time.

But, what I didn't develop over time, where I was lacking for a long time, was in the soft skills. I used to be very shy as a child (my mother probably has a few good stories). I had to grow out of that. As more time went on, and I got deeper into my career, and started to really see where I was trying to go, I started to realize that I can't do this alone.

They say "if you build it, they will come", but that's likely assuming that people already know who you are and what it is.

The past couple of years have taught me that I need to let people know who I am. I need to show people that I have a lot to offer. How else can I really do the other two things if I don't do this? I have to continue building those soft skills. If I was as good at public speaking as I was at system design, I'd probably have everything I need by now. But it's okay to not be at the finish line, so long as you still see the road.

I'm embarking on a journey, and I want you to come along for the ride. I'm also hoping that we can help each other along the way.