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I'm not underrepresented anymore. Y'all are over-represented. Not going to use a negative to describe my existence. I'm Bryan, and I'm supposed to be here.
Bryan Liles
36.4K posts
Bryan Liles
@bryanl
Not posting here anymore. Elon Musk is a Nazi.
Where the wild things are
Joined January 2007
- At a previous job, I told the CEO that I would like to be CTO of his company one day. He laughed at me and it hurt. Today, I’m a VP level engineer at a public company. That pain sticks with me to this day. Embrace those tough moments and use that energy to work harder.
- As of next week, I will no longer be a Sr Staff Engineer at VMware. I had a good run, but now it's over. Instead, I'm going to be the Principal Engineer at VMware in our telco group. Shoutouts to everyone who ever said this Black kid from Baltimore would fail and not succeed.
- At some point, being a better engineer requires an investment into being a better person.
- It took me more than 10 jobs to figure out what I wanted to do with my career. Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to stick around when it doesn’t work for you.
- This week, I started a new role at AWS in S3 as a senior principal engineer. Shoutouts to my high school guidance counselor who said I’d never amount to anything. You gave me the courage I needed to get this far.
- You aren't a Go, or Rust, or Java, or Python, or JavaScript developer (unless you are writing those languages). In reality you are a developer who uses language X to solve Y problems. You can learn new languages and paradigms. Don't get stuck in the I am an X developer.
- MLK didn’t die for our sins. He was murdered. He didn’t protest for a day off in January. He protested white supremacy. He didn’t create cute quotes. He illustrated a (still) unjust world through words. Today we remember a great man by continuing his legacy. Not by quoting him.
- A degree in CS will not make you a good software dev. A good dev consistently makes code that people like to use. All this other noise of going to the best schools, boot camps, or knowing so and so is a bunch of lies too. You want to be good? Put in the work and know you audience
- I’m freezing on a plane, wearing a hoodie with a logo of software I created, flying to one of the world’s largest open source conferences that I co-chair. The world is going through some weird times, but for this single moment, I’m winning.
- I heard this from a co-worker: You are not "working from home", you are "at home during a crisis, trying to work". This is important to realize as even I'm struggling and have been working from home for years. 60% effort may be all you can muster.
- You changed your main git branch name from master to main. Police are still killing people of color at elevated rates AND... now homebrew on my mac doesn't work. It's true that language matters, but I want to be able to safely jog in my neighborhood and upgrade homebrew too.
- Your company has a poor documentation culture. Things are slow because people don’t know how things works. Managers start micromanaging because work is slow. Leadership issues mandates. No one likes mandates, but that isn’t the problem. It was poor communication the whole time.
