Introduction

Here you will find my thoughts, frameworks and processes that have come in handy throughout my ~2 years as an Engineering Manager

How did I end up here?

I hate to reuse an old cliché but I would be lying if I didn't say that I've always been drawn to technical work, regardless of whether it's behind a computer or not.

I graduated with a masters degree in chemistry as I've always been interested in science and I was never good enough at math to do computer science when I was younger. In my first job, I was a management consultant and my team used a third party's proprietary analytics tool to identify and propose cost optimisation initiatives to our clients. This, of course, required us to analyse their spending data. Often, they would provide us with a dump of raw, unprocessed data from their ERP systems and it became more and more time consuming to do it on excel. Eventually, as we took on bigger clients, it became impossible for us to use excel due to it's row limitation.

This is where I decided to pick up Python to perform the pre-processing of the data before I uploaded it into our SQL database (which I also became the DBA of). From there, I was hooked, from setting up Anaconda to learning how to use Pandas, it was a lot of fun for me. It was then that I took my first online course on Coursera to learn Python.

I moved onto a product management role at a digital bank where I then worked with backend and frontend engineers and began to further understand the day to day work of a developer. From discussing approaches to features to understand what they do during pull request review time, I took it upon myself to learn as much as I could.

My next PM role was where I really dove deep into my developer's experience and it's where I fully transitioned into an EM role. I would spend my time learning more about web development after work and during work, I would go out of my way to pull my developers aside for chats. I will always be grateful to my team for taking the time to go through every little question I had. I slowly gravitated to doing PM work for my developers, such as planning out our CI/CD implementation and introducing and optimising our Gitflow process. Slowly but surely, after a year of doing half PM and half EM work, I fully transitioned to an EM and haven't looked back since.