17/04/2020
Having a moment of introspection this morning, thinking back over the years of how my work has changed – sometimes in pretty dramatic ways. It seems like forever ago that I was fresh out of school and working my first real programming job at a domain host. I worked hard until I was ultimately let go from the role due to some interpersonal issues. Fortunately, the market was good and I found a new role with a natural gas provider relatively quickly. I did a lot of growing there, not only in my skills but just in my understanding of how business gets done. It was while I was there that I got married and soon had to figure out how to juggle work and kids, finally getting it down about the time the second one came around.
All the while, I was still working on my passion – programming and learning how to make “better” applications. I think at the time I didn’t know what “better” meant in the context of PHP applications but I spent a lot of time reading up on the subject and, yes, attending conferences (my first was php|tropics which I still can’t believe my employer paid for to this day). I made friends in the community, both local and national – even some international – that helped me build my skills. They were there when I had questions about how to create something and regularly had books, blog posts and other recommendations for resources to further my understanding of what “better” meant. I was constantly improving and moving up the ranks from junior developer to senior developer then lead developer and, yes, even a manager of a development team (it was weird).
Fast forward a few years to about five years ago. I sat back and looked over my career so far. I really looked at the work that I’d accomplished over the years, how I’d grown in my understanding of what “good code” and well-structured applications meant. I understood some of the higher level development concepts (like SOLID) and how to effectively apply them in my day to day work. I was co-organizaing the local PHP meetup, had started sharing my knowledge at conferences and through books and several articles on a wide range of topics. But I’d hit a problem that Young Me hadn’t thought was possible: I felt like I was stagnating.
I looked at the work I was doing (a security company but doing PHP development, not application security) and, while I was enjoying it and the people I was working with, there was something nagging in the back of my mind. It wondered if this was where things leveled out and the only way up was to a less technical role. I’d always been driven by the tech and exploration, so at the time that was a non-starter. I needed to find something that would fill my need for more tech and more exploration but I didn’t know exactly what.
I looked around at the work I was doing and the industry I was in and realized what I needed. I needed to specialize. I needed new challenges that both appealed to my desire to stay in the tech of things yet provided me with room to explore other things. I’d always had a passion for security (as anyone that knows me can tell you) so it seemed like a good option. I started to do more research and learn everything I could about the current state of application security. I’d had a cursory knowledge of it in the past but I really doubled down, watching recorded talks, reading tons of articles and even giving/writing some of my own (the best way to learn is to teach, right?).
