2022 @ Monograph — The Design Engineer’s Year in Review

Can you believe it? I’m finally on vacation. You know, one of those keep-your-laptop-closed-at-all-times-but-keep-it-around-for-SOS-emergencies-and-company-Slack-pet-photos-channel vacations. It’s a wonderful feeling, waking up late and waltzing on over to a cafe, no pressure, no plans, skipping and whistling down the street, high off the overabundance of sleep and severe lack of responsibilities. I sit here in one of millions of stylish cafes somewhere on the outskirts of Seoul, 1pm, slowly watching people hurriedly pass by on their day-to-day, sipping coffee that is a tad bit too icy for this not so very warm, yet sunny(!), day. As I shiver with each sip, I realize it has been a while since I’ve had such a time to pause and think about life. For the past half hour I’ve been pondering about my job, my career, and what the effing hell I’m doing right now in the entire context of what I’ve come to understand as life-in-my-late-20’s. Much happened last year. Much has happened this year. If I were a betting man, I’d say much more will happen next year. I’ve gone from relying on my colleagues’ knowledge and insights before initiating action on engineering problems, to initiating action on engineering problems and then relying on my colleagues’ knowledge and insights to remedy whatever brilliant plan it was that I initiated. It was an interesting year as one of the junior engineers here. Well, wild is a bit more accurate.

How it Started

My year began on the freshly formed Data Team™, a lofty team with lofty ambitions, striving towards data integrity, data-based decision-making, reliable analytics, and basically spending most of the time figuring out how Looker works. Actually, I was splitting my time between the Data team and the Growth team for a few months. The reason? I was working on Growth projects before the data team came about, and when it did come about, it took a while to get it moving. So, there I was. Data/Growth Daniel™. This era was the first time I’d had proper managers in this organization and I quite liked the convenient passing off of all bureaucratic communication to my higher-ups. But, it was a strange few months, for it didn’t seem as though we were actually ready for a data team as an organization. Mostly due to the lack of any solid goals that would turn into any solid projects that we could put onto any solid roadmap. While this team came into fruition, a couple of other teams were spun up in the engineering department and, honestly, it was rather overwhelming. Not to mention, I had just moved to Seoul in February, so in addition to the deluge of personal-life changes, there were a lot of work-life changes.

So, there we were. New teams, new faces, every week, with new projects, new processes, and new aspirations. For a little while, at least.

I’m not quite sure about how much I actually learned whilst on the data team. Most of my tasks were related to cleaning up our analytics and third-party data pipelines. I suppose we refactored event-tracking on the backend and upgraded/implemented three huge tools (Amplitude, Salesforce, and Looker). But, I suppose even more impressive is that during this time I maneuvered to an almost completely asynchronous remote work style where I couldn’t depend on others during my days and where I had to put on the big boy pants and just get shit done one way or the other. I’m still wearing those big boy pants.

Then, we had our rift. An unfortunate situation and an event that just kinda leaves a weird taste in the back of your mouth for a while. All those new faces gone, some older faces along with, and adjusting to the effects of downsizing — downsizing our size, downsizing our ambitions. So, there we were. Two engineering teams, once again. I was back on the Growth team, building and experimenting with building “experiences that grow revenue by driving customers to value, as well as the tools that enable product teams across Monograph to ship faster and more confidently.” — Team Growth, Monograph. There we were, 40-something-person Monograph again.

I’m currently scrolling up on all of our Slack channels to see what major timeline events I’m missing, but as I scroll up, I remember that even during the times at which those events occurred, I still had no idea what was going on. There was so much happening all over the place for a while from mid-spring to mid-summer. Didn’t help that I cut my meetings down by like 90%. It felt as though each time I opened my computer, I needed to perform some pseudo dev-ops magic to get everything to work with whatever new changes our engineering gurus made the day before. And then, it just slowed down. All of a sudden. For better and for worse.

How it’s Going

“There’s no going back. You’ve changed things…forever.” — Joker, The Dark Knight. Well, we’ve changed things. Definitely not forever. We now have The DRI™ — Directly responsible individual. A term coined by Apple, then adopted by Team Growth to mean the engineer responsible for knowing the state of the project they’re responsible for, at all times during the project cycle. Not the engineering manager, nor the product manager. The DRI ✨. This was an organizational concept we tried out on the Growth team, to success (so far). From my perspective, it forces me to understand the project in its entirety and get a handle on all the moving parts. When I’m not the DRI for any given project, I generally have no idea what’s going on with that project. Got a task that’s open? Sure, leave it to me. I have to help with what? Ah, okay, gotcha, be right on it. I have to build a page on the frontend for what? Dammit, well, alright, big sigh, shot of whisky, let’s get this over with. But, as a DRI?…Let me assign those tasks for ya. What tasks? Oh, let me create them first. Which designs are we referencing for this? Gotchu fam, here’s the Figma link to the specific frame. How’s the engineering work going? Great.

So, it’s going pretty well now.

Frankly, I’ve been so absorbed in my one role that I’ve forgotten to zoom out every now and then. There are pros and cons to this more siloed lifestyle. My speed has increased immensely since the previous year; I’m no longer spending half my time figuring stuff out. Our design system’s been fleshed out to a decent-enough extent at which building things on the frontend is no longer painful (well, unless we’re making changes to our legacy frontend…that’s still incredibly painful) and I’ve gotten the hang of GraphQL. For the most part. Cons? I’m still not nearly as thorough as I could be, nor am I as organized as I should be. Which is rather strange, because outside of this digital world, I am the neatest person you’ll ever meet who isn’t clinically diagnosed with anything. I’ve still got a ways to go, but 🤷‍♂️.

What’s up next?

I have no idea what’s up next. I’ve been feeling a bit bored these past couple of months. Part of me wants to get back into data, or perhaps get into performance or dev-ops a bit. Maybe take a SQL class here and there. Or maybe reawaken the designer in me who, I believe, fell into a coma some time back. Gotta find him before he gets lost in the abyss, probably drifting off in the Lake of Tears near Burnout Mountain. Perhaps I should get back in touch with the former architect in me and rekindle my affection with the built environment to remind myself of why I’m building things on the web for them. I’m also still the resident third-party integration go-to-person, which apparently doesn’t scale very well. We should probably address that soon. Maybe? Maybe maybe maybe. Yet another year has passed and the more I learn, the more I realize how much more I need to learn. Maybe.

Oh, and fuck TypeScript.