My foray into entrepreneurship began soon after I took my first post-graduation job, when I found my nights and weekends being spent coding. To my surprise, ~9 years later, I’ve come full circle – spending nights and weekends coding.
My teammates who have the unfortunate duty of sitting near me hear me give the same anecdote repeatedly during initial introductions. I’m a software developer by trade, but we’ve been fortunate enough to hire engineers who are much smarter than me, and don’t let me code. Which is half true – the other half being that the duties of Contactually, now at 65 employees and growing, has my time devoted to many other high-leverage tasks. I still enjoy seeing product I built in the formative days of Contactually still get employed, and still rank as one of the top committers in our git repo.
I’ve pledged to myself, however, that I still need to remain technical. Yes, it does help from time to time being able to pull up a server console to grab some data, or to be able to ensure we’re fully answering questions we get when I’m working with current or prospective enterprise customers. Much deeper than that, however, is still wanting to retain that identity of a software developer – and not let that muscle atrophy. The flexibility of being able to build whatever I want or need, now and in the future. The creative output.
So I find myself spending my nights and weekends back doing what I still have a passion for – coding. It’s a lot harder to keep up, especially as my mind has adapted towards other responsibilities. But while it may take significantly more time to plow through challenges, achieving that state of flow and translating ideas into reality still remains one of my favorite activities.
