30: Developer, Dad, and Pragmatist

It’s been seven years since I sat down to write one of these. What was meant to be a yearly tradition quietly slipped away from me, and reading my last post from (serendipitously) almost exactly seven years ago brought me immense joy. That’s a long stretch of time, yet somehow it feels so short. The person I was then feels familiar in some ways and impossibly distant in others.

👨‍💻 Being a ‘lifer’

Past me would probably be surprised to learn that I still work at Shopify. Not because Shopify is a bad place, it was an incredible place to keep honing my craft as an IC, but because I was so certain that the way to grow professionally was to stay uncomfortable, and that the way to stay uncomfortable was to keep moving. Seven years later (eight this September) I’m not only at the same company, I’m on the same team.

On Shopify Capital we’ve been up to some wild things. When I joined the team our total dollars lent sat in the low millions; today we’ve crossed $5 billion. Our largest loans are now multiple orders of magnitude beyond what we used to offer, and we’ve expanded into a half dozen more countries. I got to help build the playbook that made those country rollouts possible, and shipped brand new Line of Credit and Flex products along the way, with plenty of successes and failures that have made me a stronger developer and a person who can get shit done. Shopify itself went from a company people often misheard as “Spotify” to something fairly well known somewhere in there.

📈 Growth

All of that is to say I’ve grown a lot. I’ve mentored interns, juniors, intermediates, and even senior developers. I started down the path toward engineering management, then eventually rerouted to focus on the Staff/Principal track (which I’m happy about). Somewhere in there I found a serious appetite to keep expanding my T-shape and growing my skillset.

I like to think I’m not completely AI-pilled, though I’d be lying if I said it’s not the thing in tech that excites me most right now. There’s obviously too much to cover since my last post here, but if I’ve learned anything it’s that I had the shape of a career wrong. The rocket-like trajectory I idolized twelve years ago when I started my career, and the exponential growth I admired in the people around me, is not necessarily the path everyone should be chasing. Being genuinely useful to a team and improving people’s lives takes many shapes, and I’m far more open to the winding ones than I used to be.

🦠 COVID

COVID was a rough stretch for everyone. Being in Canada and ending up at a company that went remote-first meant my day to day was impacted far less than most. My girlfriend and I chose to stay living with her parents and help support them after they both lost their income during the lockdowns.

Once restrictions began lifting and my work committed to fully remote, we (along with seemingly everyone else) started looking to buy a house. We were lucky to find a modest 1960s bungalow close to both our parents, and I even started a separate blog to document the financial side of the retrofit, cutting thousands of dollars a year in energy costs down to something more manageable and hedging energy markets on the way to a net-zero home.

COVID slowed some of our plans and delayed our engagement, but we made the best of it. Like a lot of Canadians we leaned into domestic travel, hitting both coasts to explore the GVA and the Maritimes, Newfoundland and Labrador included.

🏃 Endurance running

I got into endurance running, which I recognize is a bit of a big tech cliché. Before software, I weight trained somewhat seriously, and I never understood why people would run or bike such long distances; it looked like they were choosing to “waste” their time. What I’ve found is that the enjoyment is in the journey and not the outcome.

Since then I’ve run 7 marathons, a couple of ultras, and logged hundreds of hours of training. I’ve learned that being fully engaged with something for its own sake is the closest thing to the flow state Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes, the same book I wrote an entire post about years ago.

❤️ Personal milestones

Shortly after our 9-year anniversary my girlfriend (now my wife) and I got engaged, got married two years later, and earlier this year welcomed our first child. Parenthood is the newest challenge for us and absolutely a topic you’ll see show up on frugalnick. I noticed a real shift in how I weighed decisions; the excitement of chasing something new started losing ground to the pull of stability.

💀 Boundaries

Big tech has been a roller coaster through all of it, stock market booms and busts, massive hiring sprees followed by layoffs, exciting stretches and deeply stressful ones. The last couple of years have seen AI and LLMs swallow the industry whole, eclipsing everything before them. Watching family members encounter health struggles, heart attacks, cancer scares, and cognitive decline, made me reconsider how I split my time between work and recreation, and in a software world that is higher pressure than it was five years ago, knowing where my boundaries are matters more than ever as a new father with aging parents.

Balancing being present for my family and friends with everything else is something I continue to struggle with. Being completely honest, there’s some self-imposed guilt there, and hopefully by the time I write next year’s post I’ll have found a healthy balance, or at least have one in sight.

🤔 Whats next?

This AI renaissance is exactly what’s letting me pick up passions I’d set down years ago. I was able to rebuild my old personal finance blog with functionality I’d always wanted it to have, and I’m jumping back into this technical blog with plenty to say about the AI space. Even something as simple as writing a blog post used to involve work well beyond the writing itself (editing, managing hosting, tweaking themes, wiring up email notifications), and the new services and technologies available today let me focus on the writing and automate the rest.

Seven years ago I ended that post wanting to “be my own person, whatever that means.” I’m finally starting to figure out what that means, and I think the person who wrote those words would be proud of the person I am today. Don’t expect me to disappear for another seven years, there’s far too much I want to write about now.