> but more importantly it takes just doing fantastic work when the opportunities present themselves.
It has taken me a decade to realize this is the key to success. Just do your very best work, as often as possible, and let the rest figure itself out.
I accidentally created a data warehouse that became the necessary backbone to launch a massive new org (100M+ revenue). I was building it for a relatively small near realtime Elasticsearch cluster to generate data reports for an application. But I thought, gee, if I suck in a bunch of other data from other sources and clean it, I might find a use some day. Little did I know that someone else would piggy back on it to build a POC for a giant business expansion.
I've been stuck in the mud for a bit and had been slowly forgetting this one papercut at a time. Since this is usually not something I'm susceptible to, it has been troubling me.
Last year I pulled off a minor coup by making it cheaper and easier to run a big chunk of our code. One of the senior people was trying to get me to toot my own horn but the actual work was like one week of cleverness and five weeks of book-keeping, and so it felt too slog-like to celebrate.
But a couple weeks later when I was doing some housework it dawned on me that it was 'only' six weeks of work because of a bunch of fairly thankless things I'd invested a great deal of time in over the previous 18 months. I'd been dribbling out appetizers for a while, this was the first big dish, and I'm not sure it's the main course, so it's not like I missed my big chance, but I probably should have honored it more.
I'd had an initial 'I told you so' feeling in the heat of the moment that pushed down as feeling petty, and delivered instead a fairly lukewarm "this is what I am talking about." This is, in fact, one of the things I'm talking about, but I think I'm past trying to recruit people (all the fun people to recruit are gone). I'm sadly just following the Campsite Rule and splitting my priorities between things that help me do my job, and things that might help me do the next one.
In that respect, I've been chasing a dragon (two, in fact) for the last couple of months instead of acknowledging that paragraphs like the one above are a pretty good indication I should be focusing all of my energy on job hunting instead. Wisdom is on a continuum and there's a lot of room still for foolishness even if you've got a lot of things figured out.
It has taken me a decade to realize this is the key to success. Just do your very best work, as often as possible, and let the rest figure itself out.
I accidentally created a data warehouse that became the necessary backbone to launch a massive new org (100M+ revenue). I was building it for a relatively small near realtime Elasticsearch cluster to generate data reports for an application. But I thought, gee, if I suck in a bunch of other data from other sources and clean it, I might find a use some day. Little did I know that someone else would piggy back on it to build a POC for a giant business expansion.