I feel incredibly grateful for the past year I’ve worked as Managing Director at thoughtbot. I am so proud of our team and everything we have been able to accomplish for our clients, what we have learned, and how hard we worked to share that knowledge. So what have we done over the last year? Let’s dive in.
We’ve been working hard to share what we learn
thoughtbot has long been known for as an expert partner for product strategy, design, management, and development. With over 20 years of experience, our team has had a lot to share about the platforms we use to build highly scalable web applications.
Here’s what our platform engineering team has been talking about for the last year:
- Route-Based Scaling on Kubernetes for Rails Monoliths
- How not to deploy an LLM
- Alerting everything, everywhere, all at once
- Open Source Festival - Lagos, Nigeria
- Ask a thoughtbot CTO all about CI / CD
- A Journey into Site Reliability Engineering
- CI/CD : Automating Tests and Deployments the Fun Way
We want to write even more next year to share all the things we’re learning from building, managing and operating the underlying infrastructure of the web applications that are so essential to their business. As a Managing Director, I am never more than a LinkedIn message or Mastodon post away from any questions our community may have that I can work with our team to answer.
Adventures in podcast hosting
As one of the co-hosts of the Giant Robots podcast, I recorded almost 40 episodes - including the 500th episode where we met all the past hosts. The title Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots about people who are building great products gets has started some amazing conversations and connections for me. It was also fun to get to be a guest on Tacos and Tech and Ruby on Rails podcast, so I’m not always a host and never a guest.
Building a network from scratch
When I moved from Washington DC in December of 2020, I left behind a big network including but not limited to DevOps DC, Women Who Code DC, and the Digital Service Coalition. Before the pandemic I organized and attended meetups and events so frequently that I had to limit myself to no more than 3x a month, and I was not always successful with remaining under that limit. Dealing with the isolation of the pandemic plus moving to California and having to restart my networking groups was challenging.
Joining thoughtbot has given me the opportunity to travel abroad and locally to connect with new-to-me communities at:
- RailsConf in Atlanta, US
- Ruby Kaigi in Matsumoto, Japan
- RubyConf San Diego, US
- San Diego CTO Lunches
- San Diego Tech Hub
- 7CTOs 0111 Conf
- San Diego Founders Hike
It’s not every job where a part of your role can be waking up at 5:45AM to attend a founders hike in Torrey Pines, San Diego.
And of course, finding time to be a person, not just a Managing Director
Outside of work, I’ve been striving to keep my health and wellness top of mind. Finding a balance between re-building my network, managing a growing business, and staying on top of trends in our industry in addition to my personal life is challenging. Luckily, it doesn’t rain much in Southern California, so I’ve been surfing, and practicing more traditional and multi-pitch climbing. I also attended the oscars, and appeared in a beer commercial.
When I look back over the last year, I feel an immense sense of gratitude for the people I get to work with every day, who make it such a joy to live and learn alongside them. I can’t wait to see what we will all do together this year!
