I wanted to start this blog quite some time ago, I think at least 5 years ago. What kept me from actually doing it might have been a combination of procrastination and imposter syndrome.

To tackle the procrastination I am defining goals for 2020. To keep the chances of achieving these goals realistic I try to keep the list quite small and will divide each goal into sub-goals and will schedule a monthly check on how the progress on these goals is.

2020 Career Goals

  • Pass my CKA exam
  • Get more comfortable writing go
  • Reiterate my future career plan
  • Start and keep blogging

CKA

The CKA exam will happen after I completed Linux Foundation’s Kubernetes Fundamentals (LFS258), which is a self-paced course, but is limited to one year. I enrolled at on 2019-09-16 and my employer finleap Connect is paying for it, so I have a 2-dimensional motivation here: A hard deadline (2020-09-16) and not wanting to waste the money of my employer.

golang

My experience with go is still kind of limited. We have a few go projects at work and I also have a small hobby project using serverless go at zeit.co, but I still very often don’t know the idiomatic way of doing things. Sure I can solve problems, but coming from the python universe I want to want to be able to choose the one right way to do things. That’s why I am currently doing the go track on exercism when I find the time. I feel like the mentor’s input gives me what i need to know to be able to write more idiomatic go code. Even if the first few exercises seem “boring” to solve, but actually not using time and energy in finding a solution but the most idiomatic one feels like a good investment.

future career

Regarding my future career plan I feel like I need to do some soul searching. My second son was just born and for half a year I am on parental leave. This puts me in the comfortable situation to reflect my current job situation, the current state of the software industry and if there is room for improvement. Improvement would not necessarily mean to quit my job and start something else but after evaluating my own market value I feel way more confident to push my career into the direction I would like it to be.

But what do I actually want? For one part definitely enough time with my growing family. Having 2 kids was a conscious choice so not being at home for 50-60 hours every week (40hrs plus lunch breaks and commute) feels kind of wrong. So even staying on my current job with a bigger share of home-office would be a big improvement.

Even if I exclude the whole work-life-balance topic, there are other questions to think about: Do I want to be promoted to (middle-)management or are there other career paths where I can keep doing what I love but still move forward? Do I have the courage to leave my comfort zone and start being self-employed or pack my family to move to another country? The said soul search has not even begun. I really need to find a way to structure my thoughts on everything.

blog

All of the goals above feel kind of natural to come together in the fourth one. Even only the 3 first career goals for 2020 seem to provide enough fuel to be able to keep this blog at least semi-active.

I will also try to use this blog to keep track on the progress of the other goals. Keeping track of the progress should help me identify if I get stuck somewhere.

imposter syndrome

The other thing I want this blog to help me with is fighting imposter syndrome. Every time wanted to start this blog I felt that the information I wanted to share was too trivial or low-level. Who would read a blog entry where someone just learned about some topic or does not fully grasp everything around that topic? But after listening to the go time podcast episode #30 where the hosts discuss the imposter syndrome I realized what I actually knew before: It is ok to not know everything or master everything from the beginning. And maybe there are other people out there exploring new topics can actually profit from my insights I share while learning something.

I guess imposter syndrome is also coupled to anxiety of being wrong or perfectionism. So to overcome it in my case where it held me back from writing my blog, it really helps to admit: It’s is ok to be wrong sometimes and it’s especially ok when we are in the process of learning.

Note to myself: Write a rant about the school system where we systematically got punished for mistakes instead of embracing the opportunity to learn from these mistakes.