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I’m Gonna Hit The Ground Running

I already wrote about leaving Caktus to start a new job at Red Hat and that first day was today. I’ve never really had this kind of new-hire orientation before, having spent all my previous software career as a freelancer and just transitioning from a contractor to employee at my last company. I didn’t know what to expect.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what this transition means for me as a developer, obviously. I’m making than a transition in companies here. I’m moving back to full-time Python work from years as one of those Full-stack web developers. While software always has many moving parts I’m transitioning from an environment with multiple diverse client projects to working on more focused, coherent works to deep dive into. Moving from Ubuntu to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, MacOS to GNOME, thirty coworkers to over 10,000.

So it was time for a change and clearly I decided to just take them all at once. Software development is inherently change and new: by virtue of being built everything you make is new, even if similar to the things that came before it. You always learn something new, even as you grow in the experience you can bring to every new project. I have to ask myself two really important questions about how this is going to work:
  • How can I make all the twelve years of experience I have make me as successful as possible applying it to such a new environment and such new kinds of projects?
  • How can I absorb as much of the new experiences I’m going to have in the next few years and avoid being either overwhelmed or leaving too much on the cutting room floor when adapting that experience into my developer-mind?
There might be good answers to those questions, but I don’t quite have them yet. This is something I’m going to get wrong, but not totally wrong. I’m going to make some mistakes and learn to make some adjustments and I’m not going to be phased when that happens. If I can expect course corrections later, then the best thing I can do now isn’t to decide exactly how I’m going to do great, but to decide how I’m going to keep doing better.

I love software because I love solving problems. Knocking a new job out of the park is just one more problem.
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