If you had asked me ten years ago what becoming a better engineer meant, my answer would have been surprisingly simple.
Something like:
- Learn new frameworks.
- Write cleaner code.
- Discover better architectures.
- Build more complex systems.
That was where my attention naturally went.
Looking back, I don't smile because I was naïve.
I smile because, at that moment, those things genuinely mattered to me.
I was doing the best I could with what I knew, the experience I had, and what had my attention.
The interesting part is that I never really decided to become a different engineer.
People often ask what changed.
Honestly...
I don't think I changed first.
My attention did.
And that almost always happened because someone—or something—gently redirected it.
Sometimes it was a person.
Sometimes it was a project.
Sometimes it was reality itself.
Looking back, I can almost draw a timeline of where engineering kept taking my attention.
- A Product Owner trusted a new engineer with a project much bigger than he felt ready for.
- A manager kept encouraging me towards Engineering Management when I wasn't convinced I belonged there.
- QA engineers asked the same questions until I stopped seeing interruptions and started seeing recurring costs.
- Stakeholders struggled with tools that felt perfectly obvious to me.
- Production forced me to think about software long after deployment.
- AI suddenly made ideas that had lived in the back of my mind economically possible.
None of those moments gave me answers.
They simply made me look somewhere I hadn't been looking before.
For a long time, I thought I was learning engineering.
Today, I think engineering has been teaching me something else.
Not what to think.
Where to look.
Or perhaps even more importantly...
...where I wasn't looking.
Every few years, something reminds me that I've been looking at the world through a particular lens.
Not the wrong lens.
Just one among many.
The technology changes.
The people change.
The products change.
And, quietly, so does the way I see them.
One idea has stayed with me for quite a while now.
I try to assume that people are already doing the best they can.
Not the theoretical best.
The best they can with:
- the knowledge they have,
- the experience they've accumulated,
- the energy they have that day,
- the people around them,
- the constraints they're working under,
- and what currently has their attention.
That includes the younger engineer I used to be.
I don't wish he had cared more about production.
Or observability.
Or stakeholders.
Or internal tooling.
At that point in his journey, he was looking exactly where he needed to look.
Without that version of me...
...this one wouldn't exist.
I hope one day I'll be able to say exactly the same thing about the engineer writing these words today.
So why am I writing this series?
Not because I think I've figured engineering out.
Quite the opposite.
I'm writing because I have a feeling that, ten years from now, my attention will have moved again.
I'll probably read these pages and realize that I was looking somewhere else entirely.
I don't want to lose that perspective.
I don't want to remember only the projects.
Or the promotions.
Or the technologies.
I want to remember how I was looking at them.
Because memory is good at preserving events.
It's much worse at preserving perspective.
If these articles end up having any value, I don't think it'll come from the conclusions.
I hope it'll come from the stories.
Maybe you'll recognize some of your own.
Maybe you'll disagree with mine.
Maybe you'll notice something I completely missed.
If that happens...
Don't follow my conclusions.
Follow whatever caught your attention.
That's usually where my own journey continued.
What I might be wrong about
Right now, I believe that growth comes less from accumulating knowledge and more from noticing where experience keeps redirecting our attention.
Maybe that's simply the lens through which I'm looking today.
If engineering has taught me anything so far, it's that another lens will eventually come along.
When it does...
I hope I notice it.
And if I do, I'll write another chapter.
