Becoming an Engineering Manager
It's been calm out here on my website.
While I've never been the most frequent blogger, I haven't written a single post for 16 months.
If you look at my GitHub contributions, I barely made it to 100 contributions last year.
People were concered about the status of my open source projects, some even asked if I quit coding completely.
With this post, I want to give you a quick update, target the concerns about my projects and share what to expect from my blog in the future.
New Challenges
After working as a frontend engineer for almost 10 years, I took a new position as an engineering manager one year ago.
I currently freelance at Carla managing a team of 4 frontend engineers as part of a cross-functional team powering the storefront.
As with every role change, I was facing new challenges and had to learn a ton of new things before getting comfortable with my new role and responsibility. To be honest, it's been an interesting journey with many ups and downs:
There were times where I wholeheartedly questioned why I took the position, but also times were I really felt I was making a difference, helping people grow and achieving things that wouldn't be possible as an individual contributor.
I'm really grateful that I have the privilege to make mistakes, learn and grow in such a trustful and friendly environment.
This post is not supposed to be a recap of my last year though, so let's continue.
New Learnings
As my responsibilities shift, so do my learnings and interests. There're so many aspects of management that I still have to explore and I'm beyond excited to do so.
But, this comes at a cost. I won't be able to focus only on frontend engineering. While I'm still very close to the discipline and always trying to stay up-to-date, I don't have the time to really dive into details anymore. This will affect the content on this website as well.
Going forward, I will focus writing about team culture, ways of working and time management. This doesn't mean there won't be any new technical content though!
Open Source Projects
First of all, let me get this right: I'm not going to stop coding.
Just because I don't code for a living anymore, doesn't mean that I'm not interested in coding at all. Actually, I have quite a few private projects that I'm working on right now.
That being said, as mentioned before, it's been quite silent on my GitHub profile. There was no Fela release since November 2022 and it doesn't look very different for my other public projects either.
The reason for that is quite pragmatic:
Most of the challenges I faced as an engineer have been solved by now and I'm actually pretty happy about the current state of the web and my personal stack. I still check my notifications regularly and discussions or pull requests are more than welcome! Yet, I won't spend a ton of time building things I don't need myself.
Reach out if you have questions, concerns or simply want to chat!
