My Awesome IT Job: Chief architect, The Hive
Hey, we all complain about work from time to time; we've all had lousy jobs. But before you call it a day and head off to the support group that meets at the bar, here's a new Friday feature at The IT Grind showcasing IT professionals that love their work.
 |
| "Oh my god I just read this aloud and I sound like a complete dork." |
Location: South of Boston, from my command center in my log cabin
Profession, specialization: I'm a Software Engineer by trade, but my 'official' title is Chief Architect. My particular specialization is picking things up quickly and filling in wherever we need extra help, and giving guidance to the various software projects, network buildouts, and so on that we have going on. It's kind of fun because we use a range of different programming languages depending on the needs of an individual project: Erlang, C, C++, Perl, Ruby (straight Ruby, Rails, and merb), Python, PHP4 and PHP5, some shell scripting. It keeps things exciting for me because I love solving difficult problems and learning new things.
Hobby: I'm one of those strange people whose job and hobby kind of coincide. I love writing code, and I love figuring out complicated problems, so one of my hobbies is actually working with an interesting (to me) branch of computer science involving emergent behavior from simple systems--training large networks of very simple interacting units at the micro-scale to do some really amazing things at the macro-scale with only minor tweaks to the system. I'm also interested in computer vision and spent years working on building hardware / software that would be able to build a 3d model of a space that it was in and be able to recognize this model from a list of models it already knew.
...Oh my god I just read this answer aloud and I sound like a complete dork. I also love watching movies in the theater, and I have a pretty nice home theater setup... I'm working my way through all of Lost right now on it.
Last book read: Small Favor by Jim Butcher-- I got turned on to the whole Dresden Files thing thanks to the short-lived Sci-Fi Channel series, which totally inspired me to pick up his books and read them. I think the whole series is fantastic, and I'm tempted to read his other series (Codex Alera) just because of how much I have enjoyed this series.
Latest accomplishment: Getting interviewed by ZDNet? Just kidding! I'd have to say accidentally stumbling upon a couple of patterns that allowed us to stop a couple of major botnet-powered bots from using fake accounts on our system to harass some of our users. We run a pretty sizable Web presence and just one of those bots was capable of making six to seven accounts per minute, spamming some of our users.
Toughest technology lesson learned: First, you can't do it all yourself! You have got to learn to let go and let someone else help you out. It's so tempting to just go "I can handle that, let me do it" but you keep doing that over and over and next thing you know you're buried under a mountain of work that you're never going to get out from under.
Second, no matter what your scalability plan is, it's wrong. You've overlooked something, and you're going to feel like a moron when you realize what it is. Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to you is that you succeed online and then you realize that you cannot handle the load reasonably. Sometimes the difference between a highly responsive site and one that doesn't respond at all is a VERY fine line.
Advice to an up-and-comer:
- Don't make your resume difficult to read. Yes, having a catchy resume is useful, but I've read resumes that looked like pie charts and Gantt charts and were full of clip art, and fancy looking. The person reading your resume has a huge stack of them on his desk, and if you made yours too difficult to read you've just been circular filed (dumped in the trash can)... Don't lie and put stuff on there you don't know jack about, either, because there is a decent chance you will end up on the phone with someone who knows something about it, and they're going to catch you.
- Don't sweat the small things--everybody screws up. I've personally had days where I've done something boneheaded and a bunch of people have to pay the price. Don't dwell on apologizing about it, but don't shirk the blame, either... Everybody's accidentally shut something off, accidentally committed some bad code that mangles something, forgotten to run the regression tests, forgotten to burn in a box and double check a few things before something goes in.
- Don't be afraid to take time off. It's cool to love working (lord knows I do), but if you don't detox and get the heck away from the computer for a few days every so often you're going to go insane, burn out, or take a keyboard to a coworker just like all those hilarious videos we've seen on YouTube.
[Know someone who thinks their IT job is awesome? Introduce them to me at debperelman [at] gmail [dot] com.]