Career reflections - Perpetua
While this blog may not show it, I am diligent with reflecting on my life and career. This year I’ve written an entry a day in my Some Lines a Day notebook from Leuchtturm1917 to recap each day. I also write longer entries about how I’m feeling with work. These longer entries occur once every quarter or after a big change. So after putting in my two weeks notice, I thought I’d switch things up and write my reflections as a blog post instead.
Background
Before joining Perpetua, I worked at an education technology company called Prodigy Games. I joined Prodigy before the company had 100 employees and left when they had over 400 employees. Those 5 years were special, as it was my first job out of University where I grew a ton. I left that job to see if joining another small company brought back those feelings of nostalgia I had. So when my friend reached out to me about an open role at Perpetua, I got excited and joined shortly after. This was an opportunity to apply all that I had learned in a new setting.
What I enjoyed
So what did I enjoy about my time at Perpetua? First, working on a project with a visible customer impact was great. That feeling of nostalgia came back as I worked on something with a direct impact on our customers. I spent the majority of my tenure at Perpetua building a product on top of Amazon’s Demand Side Platform (DSP). The team had the goal to automate as much of the effort as possible required for DSP campaigns. Being able to build something which saved customers time was an amazing feeling. We were also working on the cutting edge, calling an Amazon API that was still in beta. This led to many calls with the team at Amazon behind the API, where our feedback shaped the upcoming GA version of the API. That feeling of building something useful and new is a great one.
Another part I enjoyed was my growth as a python developer. My python experience had been with PySpark and Airflow, so getting to work on python web apps was new for me. Web development with Python feels pretty amazing compared to what I remember with Ruby on Rails or Node.js. Tooling has gotten so much better while keeping that python quality of being so easy to read. So I was constantly learning while feeling productive in building out new features. I appreciate the choice the company made in leaning into Python as the one backend programming language.
What I learned
What things did I learn from my experience at Perpetua? For one, I recognize that I strongly value autonomy and experimentation in my daily work. The dopamine hit of getting some code to work is strong for me. It’s even stronger when the idea is my own. So I appreciate it when the goal for a project is clear while the implementation is flexible. As a company grows, I assume it gets harder to keep that same level of openness in approach for every project. I think what is important to me at that point is that when a project has constraints, there is still a forum for proposing changes and being heard.
Second, I got to experience coming into the company as a new developer. I left Prodigy as part of the old guard, with 5 years of knowledge working on many of the different systems. Joining Perpetua had me on the other side, building up my understanding of the system from scratch. I found that tech debt is something all companies deal with (duh). I think another takeaway for me is to lean toward decisions that are easier to reverse. It seems all things become legacy at some point, but how difficult it is to change determines how much of a problem that legacy code will be.
What comes next
So what comes next? First, some time off. I am lucky that I can book some time off to relax. This feels like a good time to catch up on some reading. After that, we’ll see. My recent motto has been we move forward.