The struggle is real…

This December I’ll be 4 years into my Azure journey and the struggle is real.

Before going any further I am a very upbeat person, I love to have a laugh and wind people up, this isnt meant to sound like I am complaining, its more a personal story.

What do I mean by that? Well its a similar struggle for people starting out learning Azure.

Instead of where, and how do I get started (which is a common worry when starting out) I have thoughts like how do I stay relevant, what services should I keep an eye on, what areas should I go deep on?

I am what’s called a T-Shaped developer, think of the letter T – I have a breadth of knowledge and go deep in the dev space.

I never wanted to be the goto person in one area, thats just not me, I have always wanted to know something, about as much as I can, and therefor I pay a heavy price for that.

People who are experts in one area will tend to do better than the person who has a good knowledge across a lot of areas. Why do I think that, I just do, It’s hard to stand out as the goto person yeah, but if you are good at one thing then you can devote all of your energy to that one thing. I have a passion for learning and I can be like that forever.

So my struggle invloves, what should I learn?, I love working with Azure, its my primary focus area at this time. The thing to remember is technology changes, it evolves, the Cloud changes at speed. I keep an eye on trends ans I see where the trends are heading and If I am honest – not a huge fan of some of the latest technologies.

We seem to be making developing a solution a lot harder than it used to be, we seem to have black boxes which our code runs on which no one really fully understands. Maybe I am just old and need to get with the cool kids who knows.

So as you can see the struggle is real, keeping your skills up to date isnt too hard if you have the time and energy to do it. My struggle right now is deciding what technologies I want to learn, AI and Data, AKS, Machine Learning.

With Ignite coming in November I’m sure things might change and VNext is the next cool thing.

Anyways getting back to the main point, the struggle is real for all of us, not just the person getting started – we are all doing our best to stay relevant, to learn and help our customers.

Right now I am evaluting what I want to do next, I love my job and I am very lucky to work where I do. This is a personal choice I need to make and its a struggle figuring it all out.

What are you struggling with? – comment below.

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