People Who Have Shaped Me as a Software Engineer

Over the years I’ve worked with a lot of people, and a handful have left a lasting impact not only on me as a person but also on my technical direction. Ironically, some of the ones that influenced me the most were also the hardest to work with.

Kyle

When I met Kyle I already knew quite a lot about JavaScript from working on the frontend. However, Kyle introduced me to NodeJS, which at the time promised you could use the same language on the frontend and backend. Because I already knew JavaScript, the language felt immediately familiar and the concepts clicked right away.

Since then, I have built my career around NodeJS, and it took me much further than I would have ever thought. Mobile applications with React Native, desktop applications with Electron, and backend services with NodeJS – all from a single language. That versatility has kept me productive across wildly different projects for over a decade now.

Cesar

Cesar was one of the best managers I’ve ever had. He cared for the team and knew them on a personal level.

When he joined our team, we had a basic system that would receive requests and store them in a DB – which worked ok for our small scale (at the time). However, he understood how to architect a scalable system from his experience. So he introduced the team to message queues – which for me at the time was a brand new concept that just clicked.

Fast forward a few months, we had queues all over the place (maybe too many) but we all loved them. Now fast forward a few years, this has become a standard pillar of nearly all the systems I’ve architected and continue to operate today.

Robert

Robert joined our team after spending significant time with what I would consider old greybeards – a group I’d previously viewed with a negative connotation. However, the knowledge and experience Robert brought to the team left me with a lasting impact.

One thing Robert taught me was Makefiles. I always viewed those as some legacy thing that was only applicable to older build processes, tied to languages like C or C++. But Robert showed me they were really a general build runner – a simple, language-agnostic interface for wiring together whatever commands your project needed. In fact, here’s a whole article on Using Makefiles as a Universal Development Interface.

What he taught me about Makefiles ultimately impacted over 1,000 engineers when working at Warner Brothers Discovery – specifically:

• The HBO Max build & deployment process used Makefiles as the interface service teams used to configure their CI/CD process
• The internal tooling around serverless leveraged Makefiles as the tooling’s interface

Conclusion

Looking back, none of these were grand mentorship programs or formal training. They were just people I happened to work with who introduced an idea at the right time. A language, an architecture pattern, a tool – small things that compounded over years. I think the takeaway for me is to stay open to the small ideas your teammates share – they compound in ways you can’t predict.

Thanks Kyle, Cesar, and Robert!