Keeping relevance in a world of constant change
What does it take to stay relevant in a world of constant change?
“As technological and social change accelerate, the window of time in which things can be trusted to stay stable — shrinks.
In such a world, to stand still is scary”. (quote from here)
I don’t pretend to have all the pieces in this puzzle. But I will share the parts I isolated: Some tools, some discipline, and a constant effort of keeping up. Here I share how I used these tools at three points in my life.
The tools are a conjunction of a personal roadmap, and a technology radar. There are many versions of both, and I’m too opinionated to endorse any of them. Do your research and choose whatever works for you. However mind you need both to form a basis.
The latter manages a watch over technology trends. It points which new ones to jump on, and what to forgo for obsolescence. The former is a private backlog of personal development.
However, the roadmap is like a top gym membership: it’s useless if you don’t keep up with the practice. A personal coach can check up on you, but it is you who have to do the heavy lifting.
Emergence of Expertise
Expertise emerges when one leverages these tools to maintain discipline. A discipline that keeps them from sinking into a blinding comfort zone.
In the age of intersectionality, expertise in a single field isn’t enough.
For example, while Fullstack is now a well-established term, how full must a full stack be?
How much stack would a full-stack stack if the full-stack could stack code?
(my spin on this)
A Roadmap Journey
In my career path, I had to establish myself as an expert a few times. Some were simply capitalizing on former victories and sharpening an edge I already had. Some took a brave decision in the face of a risk.
As I ended my first professional decade I already established myself as a hands-on architect. Then as a JS expert, and an Agile evangelist. After that, as a NodeJS tutor, as a microservices and ecosystem designer, and as a live-coding wizard.
But as I approached to conclude the 2nd decade I came to a point where I felt limited by my lack of depth in my knowledge of the lower layers: provisioning, networks, SSL, security, cloud permissions schemes and security.
Sure, I could design a cloud, but I could not execute it by myself properly. And sure, like many of my peers I had access to AWS and google clouds, and have used their respective UI and CLI — but no. Using it is not mastering it.
Mastery is the ability to do WHAT I want, in the way I MEAN to and in the TIME I want to.
As capable as I was — I was not there.
So I adopted objectives from the realm of ops into my personal roadmap.
Operational Expansion
I started with CI/CDs, taking some challenges around Shell scripting, Jenkins, GitLab CI and GitHub Actions, and then dove in for challenges that involved Terraform, TerraGrunt and K8s. Eventually, I was able to execute a design from scratch for a K8s cluster with Argo CD on its own VPC, load balancers and SSL certificates in a full-Git-Ops manner. But by then — I indeed started to recognize a gap forming in my coding expertise.
I did make sure that NodeJS will still be involved in any task I took, but it was not my core concern. So first, these tasks required Resolve not to escape to the comfort zone in Node. Second, it required Focus on the challenges from my roadmap. Third, it took Courage in face of the risk I’ll lose leadership. And Faith, that even if I did — I would be able to bridge any formed gap and bring myself up to par.
When that risk started to manifest — I had to make sure it won’t fester.
Thus, I made it a goal that my next assignment takes me back to coding NodeJS directly.
Expert-on-Demand
As an expert-on-demand, I change tasks more often than typical organic employees. On one side — I get to see more cases — a wider view of business challenges and how they are tackled. This makes it easier to point out what works well and what does not. Or what could be adopted as a best practice, and what to stay away from.
On the other hand — there’s the need to adjust to a constant change, which is quite taxing. New challenge, new business model, new codebase, new technology, new tools.
But also new work processes, new environments, new people, new relationships, …new politics.
And, every now and then, I need to set up a new workstation from scratch.
So I took a peek at the trends to choose an OS.
Windows on The Flow (WTF)
Well…! The overall trend for Windows market-share in the past decades was a slope. Despite that — it seems that the slope has been finally halted. The past 14 months show a stable increase in Windows’ market share.
So, after years with Ubuntu, I thought to add to my roadmap a goal to dust off my go’old Windows capabilities and finally see what’s the fuss about the Windows 11 I’ve been missing out.
Besides. Every now and then I get to meet an organization that requires its R&D to use Windows. Or one that uses a VPN that does not offer a Linux client. Or am seated in a position with a screen that declares war on Linux…
The recent reassignment gave me the opportunity.
Hatching Experts
Our growing industry needs every expert it can get. We must open opportunities for people to embrace expertise, and demonstrate it. That is the first step of joining the backbone of our development culture.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes an expert. I worked with very capable people with over 25 years of experience who could not function as an expert. And I worked with people with not even a decade that did.
Here’s what I found:
Above all, it’s a way of thought and conduct, which I believe can be learned.
Explaining Expertise
But how to pass it on? How to explain it?
So far, I showcased how I picked up two goals for my personal roadmap. On purpose, the former is a big one that took me years to accomplish, the latter is almost trivial.
The size does not matter — The direction does.
The third point I’ll showcase is how I use my personal roadmap and tech-radar to stay relevant concerns how I set up my new laptop.
Not another tutorial
“How I set up my PC” is by far not my usual content.
The internet is full with how-to articles, many of which cannot even compete with GPTs. What edge do I have over them?
Besides, the technical depth of a PC setup is not for the target audience of this article, I will do that in a separate post.
And no, this is not going to be a tutorial post. It may include instructions, but not to teach you the grit. The goal is to demonstrate the parts in the way of thought I adopt and nurture. The ones I believe that give an edge.
The real and last showcase for this article is how I took a deliberate choice:
Deal less with the HOW, and more with the WHY.
The WHY is what separates a development culture from a cargo cult.
A propagator of culture
The most burning make-or-break of teams in this ever-growing industry is culture. That is the glue that bonds talents together.
Note that over the years, the technological barrier was ever falling:
- CLI terminals gave the lead to IDEs and visual tools
- IDEs enabled in-editor power-ups like code-templates, patterned refactoring tools, linters and static-code analyzers.
- And it keeps falling as AI brings us co-writer bots and AI agents with increasing levels of autonomy.
As the bar is lower, the age of talent falls with it.
As talents get younger — the fail point becomes the propagation of culture.
Thus, the long run maker of winners lies in the ensemble of practices and disciplines that empower technological talent. One that has to be nurtured and maintained actively as a core part of the development culture itself. A nurture in which experts are required to play a key role.
Conclusion
And here you are left behind. (img, lyrics)
How to stay relevant in a world of constant change? A conjunction of a personal roadmap and a technological radar are a big part of the puzzle. Another part is molding them into a recurring practice of identifying goals and pursuing them.
The hardest — is keeping up with the practice.
I can’t explain expertise to a 6-year-old. Not as Einstein would have me do. I hope I inspired enough to worth your time — let me know how you liked it.— I’ll appreciate any feedback in any medium.
Did you know you can clap up to 50 times in this platform?
