Letter to my future self 2022 edition

Reading my earlier “letter to my future self” from 2016 is interesting, because it still holds true, irrespective of how the pandemic changed the workplace: I wanted to work on delightful products with end-user impact, intelligent and intuitive products with a strong and clear vision. First class in technology, with information and technology as a “narrative”, meaning culture, and with a strong focus on operational excellence. Back then the SRE book had just not been released so it was hard to explain to classic “architects” what my role would be, yet I was keen to learn how to run things at scale. I wanted to be part of a global, distributed and diverse organization, a “swarm” with a focus on Asia, what I liked about consulting, not a manager.

All of that, and more, came true and I am grateful to Google for giving me this opportunity. I learned more about product development and excellence, customer empathy, tech leadership, reliability and eventually SRE than I ever expected - from the most brilliant and humble people I ever met. I was lucky to work on one the largest scalable, concurrent and low latency systems in the industry, diving deep into (data) observability and machine learning. Helping migrate some of them to Spanner I built up experience to help launch Cloud Spanner in Asia, and with that move from product technology management to strategic cloud engineering. I was again lucky to help integrate and migrate real-time streaming systems and data warehouses, and improve products like BigQuery, Dataflow / Beam and Kubernetes / Cloud Run. The only thing I couldn’t avoid was becoming a tech lead manager again - but I love building up teams and so I focused a lot on creating coaching, scaling (security and scoping), hiring, onboarding and culture programs, with a special focus on inclusion of diverse backgrounds and community and student outreach to make tech legible.