I have a problem

I have a problem.

I may be moving too fast for me to acknowledge the progress I'm making.

A little more than 4 years ago, I finished my service year and briefly explored leather-making, an interest I picked during the COVID lockdown.

I got my first role through a good friend's recommendation. It was in operations for a logistics company. I was fresh out of studying a course in Transport Management, but it does not really prepare you for what operations will demand from you. I jumped in and after the first weeks of finding my feet, things started to move at breakneck pace. So fast that looking back, I wonder how I got to coordinating a small team of three within 8 months.

I left that role to join a fintech startup building smart, personal savings as a technical product specialist. Never mind that I picked up software engineering in school, this was my first full-time role in tech. Again, looking back I can see a lot was committed to me but it didn't feel like it at the time with how quickly I took on new responsibilities. I was supposed to be the liaison between customers and engineers, but in no time, I was building analytics dashboards, communicating with sales, marketing, design, support and business. In about a year, my role transformed fully into product manager, where amongst other things, I led the rebuild of our products from the ground up.

I'd not rested properly during my sabbatical before I took on the responsibility of remotely coordinating a small team of developers building a web3-powered social product. That transformed to an in-person, full-time role in three months, with a team that has grown to 14 engineers building products across healthcare, fintech, and gaming.

I am up at 4am in the morning writing code to improve observability and reduce response time (directly improve reliability) when it strikes me that this is all new. Getting hands-on with frontend, backend, mobile, devOps, security, multiple languages, different requirements, all the while helping my team do their best work. It's all new. The difficult days have not been few, yet I wear it all well.

I'm realising I do not give myself enough credit. I'm taking this moment to breath before I go back to comparing myself with the next version of myself–the version of myself that is doing a lot more than the current me is doing.

I'm grateful.