Hello internet,
It’s been a few years since I’ve written a blog post. It’s funny, I code pretty consistantly ten hours a day now. I realized, as I was writing a few lines this morning fixing some issue – I missed writing words. More importantly, I missed sharing insights. I’m going to make a concerted effort to share more (although maybe not all here).
Beyond my affinity for writing. What’s really – truely bringing me back to blog writing particularly is two fold.
First: My old posts wont leave me alone!
I mean that in a good way.
Just this week, I’ve had renewed interest in a post I made in 2016 related to cURL (infact my last post), been asked about my guide to improving IQ, and discussed a solution to the Lawn Mowing optimization problem. Finally, at least twice I week I am contacted by someone interested in speaking to me about Capital One (which I very much enjoy, by the way). Which makes sense considering I’m often in the top 5 spot for search engines when you search for the capital one TDP program:
What I find interesting about the whole thing is I hadn’t even updated the site since May 2016. I was astonished to find austingwalters.com didn’t even support https (which I fixed today). Even last year, without writing a single post, I managed a pretty astonishing number of web views:
I suspect those numbers are even higher since google analytics is likely blocked by most adblockers. What supprised me is that the number of visitors to austingwalters.com is awfully close to some of my other revenue generating web properties such as Easy-A.net.
The point being, I’m actually supprised people spend an average of one minute and twenty-four seconds on my website. Thank you! And I’m glad you found use out of it. I’m looking forward to improving that even more. It seems worth it to me to put myself out there. It helps me meet new people and experience interesting things. I can’t tell you how much my blog has helped me grow as a person, but also as a professional, and I believe picking it back up again has a net positive impact!
Now, to the next reason I’m getting back into writting these posts
Second: I’m tired of politics
I’m not necessarily speaking about the politics in the U.S., which is definitely frustrating. I’m addressing more of the politics of working in a large company. I need a place not only to vent, but also to focus on the important things in life – sharing insights and improving myself and others.
I fully enjoy my job, I’m good at it. I built a team from the ground up, in a remote office, without management (my manager(s) quit as soon as I moved). We didn’t even have an assigned project, so we built and are building two awesome products (one is similar to Amazon SageMaker, but way better). However, there’s also a dark side to all of it.
Engineering and customers I understand:
Build something people want
Politics I also understand, but can’t morally do:
You promise to build what your management wants to hear
I’ve tried for years to build what customers want, what will save companies money – what’s basically better, faster, cheaper. Yet, at every turn, even with hundreds of happy people using our product(s), we are stuck in a political mess. Every company I’ve ever worked at and I’ve worked at several fourtune 100 companies down to Jimmy Johns, it’s always a mess.
In a company, you don’t build what people want, plain and simple. It’s the reason you grow slower (if at all) at large companies, while at startups you grow leaps and bounds. At large companies, it is not about being able to get things done. It’s about being a consistant and measurable resource that the company can apply as needed. I get it, I honestly don’t know of a better method.
However, to keep myself honed technically I need an outlet, and blogging is it!
Closing Remarks
Oh, almost forgot – I moved back to Champaign, IL and I’m about to have a son (literally any day now)!
I’ve also been working super hard (nights and weekends) on MetaCortex Inc., the company I started with Stripe Atlas two years ago and I’ve participated in Startup School (which I will write a post about)!
The output of that company thus far is projectpiglet.com, if you’d like to check it out. If not, I’m sure I’ll have another post shortly.
Speaking of which, if you don’t see much action here, I’m also maintaining the project piglet blog.
Stay tune for more!