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Editor’s note: Times are hard for a lot of folks right now. Take your time. Your emotions are valid. Process them. Managers should give their people some grace over the coming days. Reader’s in pain, I am with you. This week has been a week of milestones. 1) My daughter turned 21. Yes, I feel old. 2) Julie and I are celebrating ten years of marriage this weekend in Traverse City, Michigan. On #1, Aubree has been in my life for more than half of it now. In the late 00s, I said one day, “Being a father helps me be a better leader. Being a leader helps me be a better father.” During one busy summer, I had 50 people working for me at one point. Managing that many direct reports isn’t something you do easily. My trick was to manage the natural groups of friends that formed. But still, maintain team cohesion. At the same time, I was playing the role of a single father to a Kindergartner. A lot of the skills I was teaching at work were helpful at home and vice versa. I had to deliver presentations to senior leaders. This was very normal for the work I did. ...

bellwether — noun — a person or thing that shows the existence or direction of a trend; index. I want to introduce a metric I use to evaluate potential employers. I have bellwethers. People that I respect and whose work interests me. I use them to gauge my potential for success at a company. I keep a mental list of folks and where they’re working. In some cases, when I start to evaluate a specific employer, I check how long they’ve been there and often ask folks who have been there a long time how to succeed. These bellwethers have to be people you can call or chat with when you have questions. Often they’re folks that you have established relationships. Even better, have a bunch of bellwethers; this way, if you end up with multiple opportunities, you know folks at each potential employer, you can have a chat. These can be local, national, or international. But, two keys, you have to know them and have a lot of them. ...

Note: The Notes file this week is DEFINITELY worth looking at this week too. The people have spoken. DevOps’ish won’t be changing its name any time soon. I received a lot of great feedback; thank you for that. As I’m writing this, I can feel the effects of my COVID-19 booster kicking in. The joint pain is the tell for me. Max received his first shot today too. He and I will be pretty sore in the morning. Max is genuinely excited to get his vaccinations and get back to gallivanting across the globe. It’s looking like we’ll be heading to San Diego at some point in Q1 2022. Having just gotten back from Los Angeles, I can definitively say I’m comfortable taking the family back to California. Meanwhile, onboarding at AWS is going well. Amazon has a rigorous onboarding process that will ultimately inform me more about the culture and how work happens. I know it sounds like I’m marveling at the process, but it’s the most rigorous onboarding process I’ve been through in the private sector. It’s awesome. I know where tools are that I would’ve had to learn through osmosis at other companies. I’m behind on all of it, and while that’s fine (the point is to finish it over a longer time arc than I’m allowing). I’m getting through it, but there are just some things I won’t fully grasp at first and will need to see in practice (this is a personality trait). I have to commit to adapting to the Process and Tools. I’m starting to see where I can fit in, too, so there will be some technical work starting soon. It’s a good feeling because Friday, all I wanted to do was “be productive.” Get some onboarding done and some upstream work done. That felt nice. Waking up to merged PRs on a Saturday morning will always feel good. ...

Happy Halloween 🎃💀👻 I started my new role as a Senior Developer Advocate on the AWS Kubernetes team this week. Working for the second largest employer in the United States and the #1 cloud in the world is an extremely interesting dynamic. I’m adapting slowly but surely to the scale. It has a surprisingly familiar feel. I guess that’s what happens when one of your friends brings you in. But, I also have so many friends at AWS and Amazon too. It’s not like the Kubernetes world is that big to begin with. Tech isn’t that much bigger. But, it’s nice someone you met in 2017, another person you met in 2018, and on and on is DM’ing you welcome messages throughout the week. I genuinely feel appreciated. It’s an odd feeling; I don’t think I’ve ever felt to this extent. I have a very real feeling of belonging. Also, Max turned six this weekend. It’s been a really good week. I hope your upcoming week is awesome! ...

KubeCon hangover is real. I grossly overestimated how much I’d be able to do in four days, of course. I spent my little break between jobs trying to sleep in most days. Spend extra time with Max (daddy pick-ups from school are a real thing now). But, any time I went to do something technical or constructive, it took a lot longer than I thought it would. I did a lot of little niceties to various websites, pre-employment stuff, write the $newjob blog post, and generally did not think about complex things. I wanted to tinker with a list of little projects, but I opted to read maybe or play Madden instead. It wasn’t bad, but to say I’ve recovered from KubeCon is a gross overestimation. I’m going to shut myself in and lay on heating packs all day tomorrow, more than likely. Two bad ankles, a bone spur in the neck, and a bad shoulder all snarling at you doesn’t make for a good time. ...