Revamp skills

Senior Dev Revamp

I have been a part of IT industry for quite some time. Over 17 years to be exact. During that time I have worked in numerous projects, domains, companies – you name it. However, as usual, my impostor syndrome does not sleep. From time to time, it pokes me in order to put myself together, and learn something new. The story of my progress is easy to be found – my first blog Stronnice Chlebika (purely Java related, mostly written in Polish) is still online, although retired a couple of years ago. My attempt to dive into different areas of programming – which was low-level world – is also still online. Documented on BareMetalDev (yup, retired quite recently), will stay there forever and ever.

It is a longer story, why I have decided to consolidate all my activities with a new project. This time directly under my own name – going towards creating personal brand, and making it more recognizable. Ultimately, I am a single person, not a collection of internet personalities. That is why new blog, new domain, and new project that you are reading about. SeniorDevRevamp is an idea of mine, that I had for some time now. I feel deep inside, that the more in seniority I get, the less I have to deal with pure coding. It is more around-code activities, that occupy my time (reviews, troubleshooting, documentation, etc.).

Until something breaks. Or there is a need to get to the bottom of the specific area. Suddenly, I have to take a deep dive into things. Quite often, I lack the knowledge or experience (or both at the same time), to deal with the situation at hand. Which is obvious – if we don’t use something on the regular basis, we tend to forget it. It resembles a submarine, which is old and most of the time is cruising at the surface. The problem appears when there is a sudden need to operate in the depths. The ship is cracking, the crew showing symptoms of a panic attack, nothing fun or pleasurable.

To confront that issue, I decided to tackle it at its core. SeniorDevRevamp is my attempt, to revisit the core basics of my knowledge. Networking, security, JVM in general and a lot of different things. On the other hand, to more proactively look at what is happening in the industry at the moment too. Cloud is here to stay, distributed systems are gaining traction, not to mention all the hype with the upcoming AI revolution.

What does it mean in practice? I plan to get several certificates in different areas – AWS/Kafka/Kubernetes/you name it – to get wider perspective of things. You can also expect extensive posts about the basics. They should serve as the actual learning material, but also as my personal knowledge database. That way while levelling up my skills, I can also share a lot with the community. Seems like a win-win situation to me. As usual – weekly summaries are expected, and all the materials I create or prepare, will be freely and widely available to everyone interested (GitHub being the main storage place).

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