This week I celebrate four years at Lightspeed. I’m very grateful to the Marketing team for having confidence in me and allowing me to be a part of this rocketship 🚀.
I remember the first month. It’s all about excitement! Friday beer 🍻🍻🍻, really? Can I really have a beer at work? New macbook (it was the first in my life), what? Team outing? What? Again beer? 🍻 No way! Can I get this tool for my work? What do you mean I don’t have to get +100000 approvals and wait until IT installs it? What do you mean I don’t need to log every hour and meeting time?
After this “honeymoon,” I’ve understood clearly that all doesn’t matter but results. When I was reading a review at Glassdoor, I saw “work hard, play hard,” I didn’t think this was so true. But we worked hard; we had crazy parties. Every month from zero to hero, to reach new goals and new horizons.
Four years passed, two successful IPOs, Multiple acquisitions, Pandemic, but we are still young and a little crazy. We have great corporate culture and outstanding leaders!
P.S. We are hiring!
You still have a chance to join this amazing company. Click here!
Thanks Lightspeeders!
I want to thank everyone I worked with, but this blog post will be just a list of Lightspeeders and ex-Lightspeeders.
To make it shorter, special thanks to:
- Lory Ajamian, you are a great example of a leader and true Lightspeeder.
- Mark Dixon and Yamine Gluchow, for your support and advance in my career.
- Samuel Tissot, if not you, I would have never become a dev. You are the great dev and person I have ever worked with.
- Amir Altmyshbaev and Justin Bull - thank you, guys, for bearing with me.
- Charles Hanna, Virginia Cini, Derek Koziol - Thank you for your support and sorry for the jokes about JS (it’s good language! )
- Ryan Webb - thanks for hiring me! I loved listening to your stories! And all, all, all other people!
Be Aware!
Please, stop reading right here. The following countless number letters will be about my journey from SEO to an SRE. You can find better reading here: https://medium.com/topic/programming
From a shy SEO to a Lead Backend Developer
As an SEO Specialist, I was in charge of website optimization, organic traffic and, as a result - organic leads. SEO was, is, and will be a field where you know the rules; you try to follow the rules, but nobody guarantees you good results. But, just try to become a heretic for a sec and challenge the rules; inquisition will be right here, and penalties or manual actions will hit you hard. On the other hand, I had my pet projects where I didn’t code much but managed different service parts: dedicated servers, installing Flussonic, WordPress and many other things.
Mathematical problem
I loved dev work + I knew this a little bit + I didn’t feel like doing SEO all my life + I wanted to be more beneficial for the company than a guessing guy = asked for dev work.
Let`s code!
My first code that went to prod was committed on May 29, 2018. From this day, I count my real dev experience.
Fun fact: my first commit was about count() function
Everything that I did before was pure cowboy-style programming: FTP to a production server and coding… 🤦🤦🤦
Day after day, month after month, I was spending more time with PHPStrom and Vim than with ScreamingFrog and Excell. I’ve got a Scrum Master certification and was spending all my free time at Coursera, Pluralsight and Exercism.io. I became an admin of our GitHub repo; I was doing releases and was a part-time scrum master at the web-dev team. It was like this until one day when my friend and team lead said he was leaving the company to build his startup. It was a moment of profound sadness… and the beginning of work as a Junior DevOps. Since this day X, my life has changed completely. I was the only one DevOps in the team, from nobody to a “bus factor” guy. The responsibility and stress level reached the highest possible point. To archive balance in life, my self-esteem and self-confidence fell to the sub-sea level.
Time flies, thousands of lines of code were written, and hundreds of bugs were created, and I hope most of them are fixed. It was an amazing four years, and I’m sure this is just beginning!
Today, I’m writing this blog post, and I can’t believe this happened for real. Four years ago, it was another person sitting at the job interview and saying that he wanted to grow as a marketing specialist; I saw myself as a Senior SEO Specialist in 5 years… one more year left, haha.