New year, new me

I don't quite do new year resolutions usually, but this year feels like a pivot, following my job change in September last year, and somehow this compels me into setting an intention of sorts, for this year and what comes beyond.

Career

Parts of what motivated my departure from Amazon/AWS was the feeling my career was stagnating. Getting promoted to Principal Engineer is notoriously a tough feat to achieve at Amazon, but I got to a point where it felt like I was making no progress at all — leadership was clearly uninterested in investing in the projects I was pushing for, and I got tired of wasting my energy fighting this lost battle.

Now that I feel pretty well settled at Datadog, I decided to be very intentional about my career progression, and insist on making tangible progress towards a promotion to Staff Engineer (which is Datadog's version of Amazon PE). Doing this means exerting influence beyond just my team and proactively driving new initiatives. I've recently got a second mentor to help me drive this goal of mine.

In addition to this, I want to finally turn my desire to share my expertise and experience a reality. On top of regularly participating the yearly Télécom Nancy final year off-site (where I tell final year students about my experience, and try to prepare them for job hunting, and setting expectations about what it is to have a software engineering job), I am setting out to speak at conferences if my talk proposals are accepted (I am in the process of submitting a talk for DockerCon EU – Berlin).

Personal

On a more personal note, beyond striving to keep to my goal of publishing a new article to this blog a month at least (I'm low-key aiming for once every other week as much as possible); I want focus on my health more than I've done in the past few years.

I feel good in my job right now and have a lot of freedom in how I manage my time, which makes it possible for me to get back to exercise. I'm seriously contemplating going to the swimming pool on a regular basis, hopefully lose a few kilograms (10 would be dope).