I’ve been a jack of all trades for as long as I remember. My extracurriculars in high school had nothing to do with my favorite academics. My studies at Carleton — a liberal arts college that was a perfect place for a jack of all trades like me to learn and grow — focused mainly on Computer Science, but with a heavy side dose of German courses. When I graduated, I ended up joining the Digital Technology Leadership Program at GE because it offered six month rotations that focused not only on developing me technically, but also on developing my skills as a leader. It was a perfect match — I was valued for my technical side, I was valued for my people skills, AND I got more time to figure out what exactly it was that I loved about tech.
When I began the program, I expected that after two years something would emerge as the front-runner — I’d know exactly what I wanted to do at the end. I spent my rotations in widely varying roles hoping to increase my chances of finding that one, perfect job for me — I learned Agile best practices as a programmer for our Asset Performance Management product, I worked with incredibly interesting customer data used by GE Aviation, I gained hands-on customer experience in Professional Services, and put it all together while working in Brilliant Manufacturing. After two years of learning incredibly cool stuff, when it was time for me to find that new, non-rotating role, I was greatly disappointed that the grand epiphany I had been hoping for hadn’t occurred. This turned out to be a blessing — I spent an incredible amount of time reflecting on my two years on program and was able to identify the following themes:
- The Industrial use cases we have at GE are SO COOL!
- Industrial IoT is clearly our future, but we can’t get there without domain experts from the industrial side and the software side working together
- Predix has come a long way since I first started, but still has room for growth
- I am excellent at Wizard of Oz Pinball
I joined the Developer Relations organization as a Devangelist for all of the reasons above (well, three of the four). I am excited to work to see that Predix is understood by all who are technical and by those who aren’t. I am excited to work with domain experts in the various GE Business Units to figure out how to make Predix consumable for citizen developers, and to develop the content to make that happen. As a Devangelist I will get to do all of those things and more — a perfect fit for this jack of all trades.
Originally featured 8/24 on Predix.io
