10 years later, the things that still stick with me

Somehow sitting with 10 years of experience behind me since my first real-life engineering job. I started smiply as a "front end developer" at The Zebra in January 2015. We're somehow over a decade from that point and I wanted to reflect on where I am today compared to then and share what's stuck with me this whole time.

Getting into web devlopment and startups I thought would make me a bajillionare and I was absolutely wrong in every way but only in the financial sense. I've become rich in my career with a lot of great connections and experience I'm extremely proud of. I think it turned out to be more valuable than I could ever imagined. I'll take it! Where I am a bajillionaire now is in experience and a very rich and fruitful career in web development, startups and sales.

Everything is so much easier (and harder) now

At this writing (on a plane from SF to Austin with my real brain and fingers, no AI here!) I work at Vercel helping startups build the foundation of their companies. There are folks who are hot AI darlings and others who are just kinda sorting things out. The consistent note between all of them is how much closer to the code EVERYONE has become. I spent a lot of years building up to a point earning my way into the engineering world. Today, I'm a frew prompts away from doing pretty much everything I was capable of 10 years ago. It's SO MUCH easier to get unstuck as a developer now. The whole reason I learned to code was to be able to build my own MVP's. That's all completely gone now. v0, Cursor, Claude Code and others zoom people through the 4 years from 2011 to 2015 it took me to learn how the hell all this worked. This access really makes learning, shipping and growing so much easier, it's astonishing. And I have been reaping the rewards as well being able to get over humps where I'd normally quit or give up in the past. But there's a catch...

A big chunk of my projects at The Zebra were building marketing pages and making them absolutely crazy fast. It was our marketing strategy to rank on Google for a ton of different terms. This is still a common thing! But it's now shifted so drastically to LLM search that Google search sort of feels like an after thought. And since everyone can code now what you actually build has to be truly unique, integrate everywhere and work flawlessly. It's way harder to get in front of a customer than ever.

Still, I am so thankful I took the long way and learned to code. I feel I can still do anything because I see the forest and the trees. Having access to a fast car does not make a great driver might be an analogy here. I still find great joy in writing front end code and when I get the chance to rip a feature or build something new I relish in the comfort of my editor and the incredible high of hitting refresh and the changing to be what you want it to be (even with a little robot magic to aide the process).

High Leverage Activities

What is the most high leverage thing you can do right now? I didn't fully appreciate this notion until our team read The Effective Engineer by Edmund Lau in 2016. There's a lot of other coverage on this topic in the world so I won't go into it in detail. In short, do only the absolute highest most impactful work. I've consistently turned back to this as a guide post for what to do when I'm facing a mountain of tasks. A weird thing that I've landed on that I took away from this was training people. To deploy the app when I first started we would HipChat each other that we were gonna deploy and make sure we had the right script to use. We'd then SSH into some AWS box and let it rip. Startups! A year or so into that we finally got a great DevOps guy (Shoutout, Jim! Wherever you are) and he graduated us into a Docker setup. It was time to get serious! We also had a slew of new hires who showed up right after that (thank you Series A funding!). I kept thinking about high leverage work and fell into helping folks setup their machine and get going on Docker. I must have spent every day for a week helping people get setup. I was a lowly Front End Developer at the time and I lot of the backend work really intimidated me (more in a second on that) and even those guys were asking me how to get setup. Everyone went from having no clue, to ripping PRs in short order. Turned out to be super high leverage!

This pattern just continued to repeat throughout my career and it's been a focal point in my succcess and satisfaction in work. Getting people unblocked and starting to unveil their superpowers on the organization is intoxicating. At Atlassian I overly docummented everything on every project I did so people could drop in seemlessly. At Vercel I led an initiatve to teach a small team to code at their offsite. That team went on to be the highest performing team at the company 10 quarters in a row. That work led to a mandatory certification for the entire company to learn to code basic pages and still continues today for new hires.

I might be missing something but it's like the highest leverage work is training people how to do stuff and then getting the hell out of the way.

Productivity Zones

I still consistently chase short term dopamine in the form of Slack thread + notifs and a million other things. Despite all the tools and knowledge from the last decade telling us that we're actively harming our productivity FEELING active I haven't mastered it. In fact, it's gotten worse! One thing that's sticking out is finding productivity zones that are very easy to fall into and get something done quickly. I learned quickly to completely shut everything down and FOCUS on the one thing I needed to focus on and then get back to doomlooping. Still to this day that same structure of extreme focus on that one thing and then retreating back to other stuff is really really helpful.

Fear Nothing

As mentined above, I was really intimidated by the back end work at The Zebra. One of the few regrets I have is not fully getting futher into the actual backend on The Zebra. What a waste! There was so much to learn and build on, even if I was imperfect I could have at least failed in a massively safe way. I expanding my small fear and exploded it into something that wasn't real. This carried into Atlassian and sometimes still today. The antecdote is to run TOWARDS the thing you are terrified of. Today, I'm intimidated by fundraising and cap tables and financials. How do you amortize cloud spend across multiple projects? I have no idea, but I need to know and I have learned to run TO pain. Great lesson I didn't actually learn until I had some space from the situation.

Chase your skills

Last one and probably the most important. I was afraid of the back end stuff maybe because I wasn't interested in it? And I didn't run to that fear because it wasn't somethign I got excited by. What really excited me? Learning about how to build custom UI elements for our partner customers. "What is this solution engineering thing" was a question I asked in 2017. I went on an entire side quest to further my career as an engineer when my real skills are in engineer AND sales...solutions engineering. I say that I didn't find product market fit for myself until I got to Vercel and doing solutions / sales engineering in 2023. If you aren't totally loving it, try other stuff. I totally love Frontend Development but my happiness and career didn't really feel like it was taking off until I combined Frontend dev work with sales and solutions. What's the combo job out there that I'm going to fall into next?