Jeremy MacArthur: Developer 💻, Manager 👨‍💼, Terrible Flyer ✈

Ah process, everyone’s favorite word in tech! Right up there with “synergy” and “let’s take this offline”. What can I say, I gotta work that algorithm. Process is an interesting topic though, especially when you have worked long enough in industry to have the new hires be a different generation than you. How did that happen already! I am only 35 for crying out loud!. Someone bring me some soup, and a blanket and a fully funded RRSP. ...

As an up and coming or experienced Go dev, I am sure you are writing tests all over the place! Right? Riiiiiiiiight? Trust, me you better be. There are a million blog posts out there talking about the value of testing your code, so I will sum up why you should test your code in one sentence. Dum dum brain make dum dum mistake, test catch dum dum mistake, you keep job. ...

Passion Projects Every year for the last 8 or so years (excluding the COVID blur of course) my good friend and I head wayyyyyyy up north to a small town near Bancroft. This isn’t that untypical for a Canadian living in Ontario, especially in Toronto, but what is unique is that we do this in November. Yup, sunny, warm, tropical northern Ontario in November. Why? Mostly because pain and surviving the harsh climate makes me feel alive, since as we all know I am such an adventurous and dangerous fellow… The real reason is passion, and in this case, a passion for racing. Yup, rally racing. We drive 4 odd hours to stand in the cold (with bouts in a heated bus, we truly are bougie) and watch people drive their cars fast through the woods and we love it! ...

Well, it was bound to happen, I lapsed in writing my blog and I am back now with something I know a lot about: My own opinions! No one else in the world has the expertise that I have in this domain, except my therapist. He knows too much… Preamble aside, lets talk about the topic of the day: Optimism as the human default. Let’s get optimistic, optimistic! ...

Working as a manager is always a learning experience, for me at least. Maybe everyone else just knows what they are doing, but I definitely won’t pretend I do. Except if my bosses are reading this, then I DEFINITELY know what I am doing… So with the idea that always learning is the best thing you can do, here is another entry in the catalogue where my direct reports are the ones teaching me. This time it is all about creating opportunities for growth and give them the space they need. ...

Some Things Never Change I have been writing Go for a few years now, but I don’t think that means much. A significant part of my career was working on a Go system for a small ISP where I live. I never really worried about scale; I mostly worried about bugs and race conditions. Now at a large enterprise, I am concerned about distributed systems, ensuring that a service can scale horizontally, and all the fun stuff that comes with a large and busy tech stack. I know I am doing the life story before the recipe here, but it leads me to my point and keeps the readers intrigued. The point (and source of immense intrigue) is that in both the small company and the large enterprise, interfaces were the hardest thing to use effectively in the codebase. ...

Hey! Another blog post about something AWS has that is super trendy! It’s basically a must-read! What a unique topic! Ya, I know. What a typical programmer blog I have made by my third blog post. 🤷‍♂️No point in hiding the fact that I am a vanilla programmer dude, I guess. Maybe this will be the differentiator; DynamoDB was f!&$ing complicated to wrap my head around. So I am writing a blog post for the next person with whatever malfunction I have to accelerate their learning experience. It’s a public service. You’re welcome other people who have left their car at school thinking they took the bus that day. ...

As mentioned in my opening blog post, I am currently running two teams at KOHO, and to be completely honest, I have found this to be more challenging than expected. Currently, I have around 13 direct reports over the two teams plus a few additional people that I meet with regularly as part of the work I do. From this two major themes have come up. I’m not tired. No, wait, I am suuuuuuper tired… The first major thing that came up was my own exhaustion. The most surprising part of running two teams directly was how many meetings that would involve. I have approximately twenty 1:1’s every week which is ten hours of just person to person meetings. It is important to call out here, I like people. Legitimately, I enjoy meeting and talking to people, learning about their lives, and telling them too much about mine. The surprising downside to this is that I am investing emotionally into all of these meetings and that is leaving me with very little in the rest of my life. ...

I did it, I finally did it! Welcome to my new blog.