Looking back at my blog, there’s a monumental gap between 2020 and now. This feels like a good opportunity to reflect on my career journey.
I’d come a long way from my humble beginnings of having never touched a Cloud platform before joining Claranet. A brief backstory: I joined as a junior into a team known internally as “Team Bowser”. We were a new team, formed to focus on projects using Windows on AWS (there were two other teams, named Mario and Luigi, who were focused on Linux)
In 2020 I was promoted to Senior at Claranet. That, expectedly, brought it’s own new set of responsibilities which started to increasingly take up my time and mental throughput. It was a great time, I relished the opportunity, taking on bigger, more complex projects over the next few years.
2021 saw a real shift in my day to day work life. It this year that the original team members that I started alongside back in 2016 began to take on new or senior positions in the company. We were all able to celebrate that we moved one (or two) steps up the ladder rungs together.
Throughout 2021, I spent my time delivering Azure Landing Zones, lift & shift migrations, and most exciting of all, a strategic piece of work to migrate a set of ArcGIS IaaS servers that a customer couldn’t scale further due to running out of IPs on their assigned subnet. As they were already using 2 subnets and hitting capacity of both, this required moving all the VMs to a single new, larger subnet, and supporting the customer with handover documents and workshop sessions.
Between July and December, along with customer projects I also discovered a passion for promoting better ways of working within the team, contributing heavily to code standards, and re-discovered my passion for writing good documentation. As we had a fair number of new starters with varying degrees of Terraform experience, this helped onboard them into delivering projects to a consistent standard, and in an agile manner.
2022 was a big year by comparison, having fully hit my stride as the most senior member of the (new) Azure team, with a new manager, the opportunities to further grow kept coming up which i eagerly grabbed. However, it wasn’t all roses; having a new manager and having my previous team-mates no longer in the chain above me meant I had lost my closest advocates within the delivery team. I had to put in a lot of work to “re-demonstrate” the value I’d added historically to those who had no prior context of it. It was tough not having my words bring the usual gravitas, but all the same it was a good exercise to pause and take stock of everything I’d accomplished before that point. It taught me valuable lesson to be more proactive at tracking my accomplishments – having a “brag sheet” comes in handy in a lot of ways – for example, when it comes to performance reviews, salary/bonus discussions, and promotion runs.
In April I seconded to the AWS team to lead process refinement, ways of working, and streamline AWS Landing Zones in preparation for a migration project…
May saw the AWS migration project land. This project was one of the main reasons I was temporarily embedded to the AWS team, having both a background in AWS and heavy experience in planning and executing mass migrations on the Azure side. AWS Migration Services was relatively new in it’s re-branded, wrapped product offering from AWS, so not only did I get to refine this offering for Claranet, I was also able to feed back my experiences and suggestions directly to AWS. One of my suggestions even made it to GA the following year in 2023! https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/manage-migrations-to-multiple-aws-accounts-using-aws-application-migration-service-mgn-and-aws-organizations/
In the same month, I volunteered to work on Claranet’s stand at AWS Summit. The whole experience was fantastic! Talking to potential new customers, and attending talks, browsing the stands, and meeting up with old colleagues. Definitely one of the highlights of my time there.
In June of 2023 I left Claranet during a re-org of the business units, choosing to go out into the wild and grow myself professionally. I took a 6 month break which was very much a full reset, where I spent time building a homelab on k3s, and re-igniting my passion for tech. By December, I was contracting – a choice which allowed me to pick projects that were the most interesting to me, and further broadened by industry perspectives.
I carried on with contracting until I was approached about a perm role that would serve as an entry point to learning more about data engineering. I would be the sole DevOps engineer embedded into a team working on the data platform at a good company. The role ultimately ended during my probation period, shaped partly by circumstances outside work, and I was not performing at my usual level.
It was disappointing, but it also forced me to take stock. I came away with a clearer understanding of the work that suited me, the environment in which I performed best, and the kind of team I wanted to be part of.
In some ways, coming back to perm roles has almost been like coming full circle. I needed to branch out and stretch myself professionally – seeing different orgs and working different projects as a contractor gave me a lot of valuable insight into different organisations’ ways of working, giving me a more rounded perspective. The allure of going back to a perm role was from remembering the fantastic team dynamic in the Bowser and Azure team at Claranet. The people truly do make the experience.
Looking back, I don’t see the last ten years as a straight path, and I’m glad it wasn’t (ref: The Squiggly Career’s core concept). Each role gave me something different: technical depth, broader perspective, better judgement, and a clearer sense of the kind of work and people that bring out my best. I’m still figuring parts of it out, but I now have a much stronger idea of what I value, what I can contribute, and where I want to go next.