Sorting It All Out…
The past few months have been a time of craziness and chaos professionally, with a fair amount of frustration but also tremendous learning. There are so many light bulbs going off in this rapid-fire brain of mine that I am fighting the urge to chase each one of them, which is why I am trying to step back and put some perspective on all of these things—ideas, inspirations and a generally overall feeling of excitement about the technological landscape today and the endless opportunities that are evolving from its growth. I honestly believe that the times we are in today are the beginnings of an era that will make the internet boom of the late ‘90s a forgotten blip on the radar.
Take all of this and lay it out in the context of the challenges in the world, both globally and the one around us, and there is limitless opportunity to contribute to efforts to address these issues and have an impact for the better. I have been in the healthcare space for several years and have struggled with the enormity of a system that is clearly broken, yet in the middle of that brokenness lies opportunity to fix at least parts of it. While I have been struggling, I have been realizing that it is in the middle of the circus that I call my job, complete with clowns (morons is a common descriptive noun that is used) and monkeys flinging s#%*, (with my team routinely cleaning up the mess), that there is an incredible amount of knowledge and experience to be had.
My team is a small one, and up until recently I was the only developer. We have added 2 developers in the past 6 months, which in itself required a complete re-design of the development process and release cycle. That alone has been a huge opportunity for learning as the development lifecycle has been maturing from a single dev slinging code to multiple devs working against the same code base…and that opportunity is not even directly related to the industry that I work in.
I do have the advantage of being the lead developer on a team that is relatively small, which means that I am able to drive and implement ideas and methodologies with little political resistance, and point the team, which is growing, in the right direction and to do things right.
In upcoming posts, I will be sharing more of my experiences and more detail about the incredibly exciting times we live in as IT professionals and the low-hanging fruit that is the unparalleled access to technologies and communities of like minded developers. From open source projects to perfecting the craft of software design and development, there is so much to choose from. However, these times are accelerating, and the treadmill we walk on is speeding up from a brisk walk to a full-out run, requiring a mindset of continuous learning, expansion beyond the religious boundaries around platforms and languages that have been common in the IT community and a willingness to not just show up to work, but to think beyond 40 hours. I believe it will only be those that really love what they do that will survive in this brave new world.
