Washing Away Imposter Syndrome - Communities I am Passionate About - DevOps / SRE

Still working on part three of my technology journey [follow up from part two] , but wanted to share my passion about a pair of communities. I admit as a technologist I have been trying to find a community where I can contribute back to and found the DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering communities where I am passionate about the communities and sciences of both. I always recommend folks to give back as much as they can. Mentoring and contributing is an amazing way for our communities to grow. If you are like me, took me some time for my imposter syndrome to wash away and to find a community that aligned with my passion and was accepting.

JAVA is (was) Life

For the first half of my career, I was a JEE Engineer exclusively. The skills I gained in JAVA during my high school and university days were challenging for me to gain. Took a lot of grit and failure to stick with a language that I loved. When looking at the JAVA specific communities, can be a little daunting for those to join. In the mid 2000’s this was the JCP or JAVA Community Process. That was my purview of a JAVA Community; a lot of heavy hitters and I certainly am not a heavy hitter. I worked as an intern with someone who was an author to one of the JAVA Specification Requests aka a JSR for Portals; JSR 168. As a 20 year old, I could not fathom doing that until I was in my 40’s. My final stint as an intern at IBM, we actually contributed back to an Eclipse Foundation project called TPTP. I found that at Rational Software, I was the happiest I have been at any of my IBM internships because I was building software to help other software engineers; I couldn’t articulate this for a while. A few years ago by and I working as a junior to mid-level engineer in the JEE space. I finally start to participate in a few “JAVA Communities of Practice” or CoPs with my employers. During my stint in the Big Four, I was part of a group helping other consultants practice for and take the Oracle Certified JAVA Exams. I really enjoyed the mentoring and teaching portion of helping those learn to better their craft. Around this time I was starting to be a senior and then lead engineer on projects with the firm. Externally to the firm I was not participating in communities. Not sure if this was due to imposter syndrome or just overwhelmed with what I could contribute and if would be valuable. As I transitioned back to product companies now as a Solutions Architect, there is a little more field focus. I would participate in company or product forums answering questions. That was the extent of my participation. Always felt like no matter how much I did, my contributions were not really worth telling a story about. Though in the mid 2010’s started to learn about a movement called DevOps.

Washing Away Imposter Syndrome

I am pretty fortunate (or not) to have been on varying good and bad engineering teams. The sum total of my experience reflecting back is pretty good seeing a broad spectrum on how software is developed and delivered. Condensing down what I really love is large web scale and the art of developing and building software. When I was at Red Hat, we were seeing a movement pick up a lot of momentum, which was or is the DevOps movement. My two cents on this was folks have naturally been marching towards this beat but now there is a name focusing on not only the tools, but the people and process behind them. Finally in 2016 I was able to attend my first DevOps Days in ATL . I have been working for about a decade and never felt so “at home” with folks with a common goal to better the craft of delivering the software for all of those involved. Both sides of the fence, the operations and development side which are building out development pipeline processes are represented. The feelings and passion I had in my last IBM internship around developer tooling whirled right back. The biggest draw for me still is how inclusive the community is valuing different skills and points of views. Unlike sometimes the chest thumping JAVA / Enterprise Software communities, how inclusive the DevOps Days Community is, really is impressive. I like DevOps days so much, I must have been to about 20 of them over the last couple of years hearing stories and learning from the community which makes me better in our craft.

Continuing on my Journey

Thanks to the DevOps Days community, my imposter syndrome is slowly being washed away. Giving me the confidence to look at other areas that I am passionate about. Recently I have been become more and more passionate around the science in Site Reliability Engineering. Combining the pipeline practices of DevOps and solving problems at scale; back to one of my original loves large web scale. I am really fortunate that my employer is allowing me to attend SRECon this year in Brooklyn. Hope to see you there!
I will continue to work at contributing back to communities. I am also very fortunate that in 2019, I am finally an organizer at DevOps Days ATL. The community that was so accepting of me, I can help build to bigger and better to include more folks in their journey!