We sold the platform in November. After posting on LinkedIn about the shutdown and acquisition, I took a few weeks to convalesce and have a way-overplanned Thanksgiving. I leaned into that, and it kept me busy enough. Now here we are, a little more than a week later and I am bored.
I’m not just bored, though. I’m also realizing that I’m behind. (Always so behind!) It’s been at least six years since I did any coding – and in all honesty, I didn’t do much for the several years before that. I haven’t worked much in a hosted-services world outside our work with Compaas, and that never hit any scaling challenges. Plus, it just wasn’t my job to be in the weeds / on-keyboard with the technical stuff for the past seven years-ish. I had other stuff on my plate.
Sometime in 2024, I’ll be going back into the big wide world and basically everything has changed. AI/ML is pervasive. The performance bottlenecks of yesterday aren’t the performance bottlenecks of today. Hell, there have been probably two or three new web frameworks that have come and gone since I last had to think about them firsthand. (I hear a lot about web components these days, but I have no idea how much to care about them.) Add to all of that that the last languages I did any real work in were PHP and bash, and it’s clear that I have a lot of catching up to do.
Side note: Twenty or so years ago, when I was still mostly solving-problems-on-keyboard for my day-to-day work and less in the people-weeds, I had opinions about engineering. Specifically, I believed that nothing I had ever built was ever real engineering because “if you haven’t managed your own memory in production, then it isn’t real software engineering.” After a while, I managed to let that go, particularly by the time I got to FB. Sure, there was some compiled code happening there somewhere, but not in any of the teams I worked with. And the work that they did certainly counted to my mind as real engineering. So yeah, I let that go eventually.
It will be a few months before I’ll be ready for a new role, I think. I’ll spend some of that time decompressing, and some of that time shotgunning as much state-of-the-world tech as practical.