Today marks my one year at Caylent. Milestones often call for reflections, so let’s reflect.

While the company was new to me one year ago, the job was one I very familiar with. Cloud consulting, and more specifically AWS consulting, has been my life for the last almost 2100 days. I worked my way through all of the IC roles you could and delivered on dozens of projects across dozen of clients. While the role I was hired for here at Caylent, on paper, might have been indentical, there we so many aspects that couldn’t fit on that job description.

It was truely a role of wear all hats and be a jack of all trades - a role at which I have gotten pretty good at over the years. A role which continued to stretch and test me and allow me to grow.

Let’s relfect on my hats

Control Tower Catalyst

Building out Caylent’s Control Tower Catalyst was the first hat I got to put on. It was a hat that I have tried to wear many times, but someone with their more important hat would come by and tell me that my hat wasn’t important. But you know what they say, third times a charm, and it really was for me when trying to build a reusable landing zone out of code. Maybe other places just weren’t ready for it, but Caylent was.

During this under taking I was not only the cloud enigneer building the solution but I also had to wear my QA hat to fully test the solution. I had to put on my sales and marketing hats a bit while we were scaling up those teams to make sure we could sell this solution. Then we sold it so I got to be delivery making sure that it was delivered correctly. This cycle repeated itself many times before it finally reached show time. At this point we have a team dedicated to owning this solution with well over two dozen of them delivered to happy customers (we don’t talk about the unhappy ones ;) ).

Presales

The team really was a startup when I joined, even more so that my time at the CorpInfo/Onica. I found myself getting invovled in a lot of pre-sales help. Helping our talented sales guys put the solution into writing and putting a price on it. This is a hat I have gotten to wear a lot over the years even in my role on delivery so it is a hat I am familiar with. For anyone in delivery I feel like it is a hat you need to be comfrotable wearing every now and again. Being able to articulate a solution onto paper and attach a time estimate is not an easy skill, but one all consultants could use.

Recruting

I feel like I was never able to take this hat off. In my first 120 working days on the job, I conducted 80 interviews averaging about 4/week. No matter how many interviews I did or how many people we hired, we needed more. That is still the case today, the only difference is we have a lot more capable interviewers to help with the interviewing load today. I still don’t think I have ever had a week go by that I haven’t had an interview.

Mentoring

I think I was blessed early in my career to have some solid mentors. They probably weren’t mentors in the tranditional sense of the word. I probably never set up a “Montor Me” one on one sessions with them. But just being surrounded by really solid people, things start to rub off on you. Rockstar employees in every direction you look has a way of challenging you and making you grow.

Because of this, mentorship has always been something I have enjoyed. So far in my career I have been blessed to be able to take a more active appraoch in (sometimes unwilling) engineers lives that get assigned to my projects. Helping them learn and grow, mostly to my benefit, but also to help them grow as consultants and engineers. My time at Caylent has been no different. Especailly as we scaled 300+% in my first year here, we have a lot of new talent.

My normal hat

I also just got to wear my normal hat - the one were I deliver on client projects. The hat that I would argue helped propel me through the ranks of IC. A hat that I will truely miss as I look forward to the next chapter of my life.

Other reflections

A reflection would not be complete without thinking about the awesome people I am surrounded by (However, I won’t mention them by name in a blog that they never read). A lot of them were familiar faces, but being able to work more closely with those people has truly been a blessing. When I mentioned above that being surrounded by rockstars challenges you - it really does. The people I am surrounded with are incredible at what they do. From the CEO, through the C suite of executives, through my peers, the managers, all the way to the engineers and architects we have - we have the most incredible team.

Oftentimes people ask what keeps me in consulting or what keeps me at Caylent. There are really just two answers. The first is the job, I love what I do, I love helping customers, I love helping people. The second, and probably more important, is the people I work with. Taking pride in our culture and hiring awesome people make it a pleasure to work here.

Looking forward - a new role

It has been almost 45 days since I jumped into my new role running the Cloud-Native Applications team. It is jumping into the unknown. But if I have learned anything in my time doing consulting it is that the unknown, while slightly terrifying, can also be the most exciting. It allows you to grow and evolve in way that you can never do inside of your comfort zone.

That being said, I hope I get to coninue to use the hats I have grown to know and love. I hope I also get to pick up some new hats along the way. In the inspirational words of Ash Ketchum - “gotta catch em all”.