harisrid Tech News

“What really lights you up” – a good friend 🙂

That’s an excellent question!

Reasons and motives are aplenty – building a brand, monetization of secondary passive income streams supplementing active income, and practicing or honing my writing skills and my communication skills ( the written word is harder than the spoken word ). Sure, these are some of my personal motivators. But I have other motivators too – more intrinsic ones.

The Mentor-Mentee Relationship

I’ve always held strong mentor figures in my life as admirable – there’s something profoundly amazing about mentor-mentee relationships, where an older master of an experienced domain area teaches a younger student skills and shares their wisdoms and learnings accrued a long their way. Back in my undergraduate days – the days of learning and the days of research – I felt amazed at how passionate, inspirational professors who really knew their craft like the back of their hand could get their students to learn challenging skills. Some were so good, that it felt like the time that I spent with them literally made me “smarter” ( as the dictum goes, iron sharpens iron ). The time I spent with them still makes me think about how I like to approach work and how I like to operate as an engineer – to always be curious and interested, and to make sure to ask good questions.

To Disseminate my Accumulated Wisdoms

Presuming they are, that is to say :-P.

And personally, I want to share and disseminate the knowledge I’ve learnt a long the way to the next generation of engineers. I think in the long-run, writing a blog ( perhaps even a future O’Reilly-esque book or two ) would prove far more personally fulfilling. I’ve spent quite a number of years in my life deep in the dense thickets of software engineering, wearing hats across multiple domains – infrastructure, dev ops, algorithms, systems, product road-mapping, and leadership. I’m personally antagonistic to witnessing the totality of my accumulated knowledge either (a) go to waste or (b) remain forever locked and isolated within a couple of individuals across the team’s I’ve worked on. Provided that anything I share doesn’t leak private or confidential information, I’m open to getting it out into the world.

A Story of Teaching and of Learning

There’s also something amazing about teaching – and that’s making someone else in the world bright.

Let me be a raconteur – a narrator – and tell you a story. The setting is Middle Eastern restaurant back in Menlo Park, California, and it’s a cold, dry night : typically of the Bay area’s weather around that time of year. Fortuity had it that my practice buddy was able to meet up that night for a meal. I met him while I was preparing for my technical interviews – I used to practice mock 1:1 sessions with peers over algoexpert.io and pramp.io ( I made some lifelong friendships too ! ). He was one of the select few who I engaged in consistent back-and-forth 1:1 practice sessions.

At the end of our meal, he said something along these lines :

“I learned a lot from you.”

and hearing that was meaningful. It communicated something to me. It communicated to me that the time I spent in someone else’s life made a positive difference. That I managed to help someone get somewhere in the world ( in this case, an big tech company offer letter ). If someone else in the world tells me “I learned a lot from you”, it tells me that I did my job well. These words are a powerful thing to say to someone else.