My Career Dreams

In all honesty, as cliché as it sounds, my aim in my career is to become one of the best in the industry, sure that sounds potentially overly ambitious, but it’s true. I want to become the best developer I can be, I want to mentor juniors & newcomers, I want to be able to write elegant & beautiful solutions to highly technical problems.

I do desire to be an expert in translating requirements on both ends of the spectrum, from translating business requirements to technical requirements & vice versa. With regards to leadership, I do desire to obtain more of a managerial role to some extent, however for the time being I want to remain as a more hands on type employee, for the time being, I aspire to become a technical lead. In my eyes, to be a technical lead, it means having the knowledge, experience & expertise to provide excellent technical solutions, but also being able to take leadership & some managerial responsibilities.

Long term, it would be my dream to be heavily involved in a startup, possibly employed as a CTO, which in my vision, whether it’s accurate or not, this would involve technical leadership, managing technical projects, getting heavily involved with other chief executives & of course, managing all technical personnel. In my vision, as a CTO, it would involve all sorts responsibilities, from networking, presenting through to risk & cost analysis & providing excellent technical expertise. I know that as a CTO it may not be as great as it may sound, of course I’m totally aware of all associated stresses involved, an example being having to deal with personnel that may be more experienced, older, more technical, etc, than yourself. I can imagine that if dealing with such personnel, it may be somewhat difficult, especially if such individuals are stubborn or refuse to follow your leadership.

Not to mention that I know that I have a lot to learn from a technical perspective, ranging from the ins & outs of technologies such as Kubernetes through to mastering a full tech stack. Personally I would love to work with the following technologies:

• MySQL
• Nest/Node/Express
• React/Angular
• Native JavaScript
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• AWS/Azure
• Selenium
• Java/JEE/Spring

Why these technologies you may be asking? It’s personally because I find that I’m mostly comfortable with such technologies, maybe not an expert in all technologies by any means, I’ve not had the ability to learn & use such technologies for an extended period of time. I use these technologies in my own time, some of these technologies I actually use in my personal projects. I’m comfortable with a wide variety of other technologies, such as Python, however, I’ve not obtained enough experience with such an ecosystem to classify myself as an expert or a professional in the ecosystem.

I mean in my older years, provided I live that long & God forbid nothing unexpected happens to prevent me from reaching such age, I’d imagine that I’d take up contract work, remote working, maybe get involved with a small web development agency. I’m not sure why, I just love the idea of being heavily involved in a small-medium sized business, I mean great, if I can be involved heavily with a large, global & enterprise scale company, that’s awesome! But considering I’ve no managerial experience, I think that baby steps may be the best approach, there’s no need to rush these things, afterall, I’m a firm believer that life is a marathon, not a sprint.

Conclusion

Being young & wanting to progress so quickly, again, this may be an overly ambitious dream, but with enough passion, determination & dedication, I fail to see as to why it couldn’t be possible. Of course, I don’t expect this to happen in the next year, hell not even the next five years, I appreciate that such desires will come with time, first I need to progress to a more senior role, such as a technical lead. I appreciate that in order to reach my goal, I need to first obtain relevant experience, not to mention that being so young, I also lack necessary life experience, I mean I’m yet to obtain a mortgage, I have no kids, I appreciate that I still have a lot to learn.

I mean I’ve not learned to live with the stresses associated with parenthood, nevermind learning to live with the stress of ensuring that a company is able to provide payments to the staff. I also think that I may need to learn many lines, I need to learn where to draw lines also, again, this is something I’ve not had any exposure to yet, since I’m so young & I’m still at the start of my career. But where’s the harm in aiming big?