About This Blog

The inspiration for this blog was a collection of emails written in an attempt to help a smart, hard-working IT student find her first part-time job in web development. With every paragraph written to share experience, I’ve been adding points to a mental list of topics that deserve further explanation. It’s quite an effort to try and verbalize what has been learned throughout the years by trial and error, and yet it’s exactly that implicit knowledge that makes the most difference to people who are just starting off their journey.

Recently I found out that some of the things I have experienced, learned, and done can be applicable for others in navigating their professional lives. I have found that there’s a lot of know-how that is fairly easy to distill and pass on - even though it takes a lot of courage and hard work for the mentee to implement it. I was very lucky to have met one of my most inspiring, supportive mentors early on in my 20s’ - and I believe every person deserves someone like that. This blog is my attempt at a more systematic approach to career mentoring, and I think it may be interesting to a wider audience - beyond juniors starting their careers in web and software development. These are essentially the recordings of things I wish I had known when I was starting my journey.

About The Author

I’m a recovering copy-paster. Got traumatized by Java while studying Cognitive Science, went out into the world and… moved to Jawa Timur. I had all sorts of life adventures in teaching, communication, and peopling - among others. After spending some time doing sales I decided to try building things instead. I did a full stack development bootcamp, was shown cURL and got hooked.

These days I enjoy anything that comes with a CLI and eradicates the need for pressing ctrl+c. I work in Site Reliability Engineering and the thrill of incident management reminds me of sailing. I try to drive Hive Talks meetups and help organize PyConCZ. I find profound pleasure in being able to pass my hard-earned life learnings to people who are just starting off, so they can be more effective and spare themselves some sweat, tears, and that miserable feeling of standing in a very dark, very misty room of the adult life, trying to figure out what’s hiding there.

When it comes to my actual work, I found the most satisfaction in creating a solution for deleting millions of outdated documents from a MongoDB collection (and making sure a Node.js app does it regularly). Code I wrote that affected the most people was both front and back-end of one of the previous versions of apiary.io login page. Writing a Terraform script to initialize a compute instance with correct networking in OCI was one of the most challenging tasks I worked on - although still less confusing than trying to handle a callback hell in Node.js.

I am constantly learning something new, and these days those learnings are focused on Python, Terraform, shell scripting, Ansible, Linux and basic networking. I am a member of the SRE Guild for API Design & Gateway within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, where I am working on introducing a consistent and effective platform oncall training program for a group of about 50 engineers.

Ideal holiday in my world means 4-6B on Kattegat or smashing headfirst into snow on a board. I’m trying to achieve perfection at preparing scrambled eggs and oatmeal. I run on coffee and pancakes.

Thank you for stopping by the blog. I hope you’ll enjoy the readings.

Daria Grudzien