April 4th, 2011 was just another day for me. Well, except for it being my first full day as a manager. I’d been hired last month to lead a small team that had been working on our platform for years, but this would be my official start date.

I woke up early, feeling a mix of excitement and nervousness. As the team’s lead developer, I’d spent most of my career writing code and solving problems. Now, as a manager, it was time to shift gears and focus on the people side of things—navigating meetings, setting goals, and trying to keep everyone aligned.

The day started with a quick breakfast at home (just toast, nothing fancy). I was running late due to a minor traffic jam, but arrived at work just in time for our morning standup. It’s always strange seeing your team members as colleagues instead of just co-workers. They seemed like they had their game faces on today.

We spent the first hour discussing project status and any blockers we were facing. One of the team members mentioned that we were having issues with our Jenkins build server going down every few days. I’ve been working in ops for a while, but never really managed a platform before. The technical stuff was something I could handle, but the management part… well, let’s just say it was an area where I still had a lot to learn.

After the standup, I went over to our CTO’s office to discuss some project priorities. He mentioned that we needed to start thinking about implementing OpenStack for some of our infrastructure needs. At this point, OpenStack was still very much in its infancy and we were mostly waiting on it to mature before making a commitment. The idea of managing another layer of complexity just seemed daunting.

As I walked back to my office, I realized that today might not be as smooth as I had hoped. Just then, our Slack channel lit up with an alert: “AWS is down! AWS is down!” Panic set in for a moment, but I quickly remembered that this was no stranger to us. We’ve always relied on multiple cloud providers, and while it’s never fun when it happens, we know how to navigate these situations.

I gathered the team around me, reminding them that we had our disaster recovery plan in place and that we’d be fine as long as we stayed calm. We spent the next hour debugging our internal applications that were affected by the outage, ensuring that our users wouldn’t lose any data or functionality.

Later on, I sat down with a couple of team members to discuss their career goals for the year. One guy, let’s call him Tom, was looking to get more hands-on with DevOps tools like Chef and Puppet. He wanted to understand how we could better automate our infrastructure. Another, Alex, was interested in exploring NoSQL databases as part of our platform. These conversations were refreshing; it’s nice to have open discussions about what everyone wants out of their jobs.

By the end of the day, I felt a mix of exhaustion and accomplishment. I realized that managing is not just about the technical stuff—it’s also about helping people grow in their careers. It’s about setting clear goals, addressing concerns, and being there when things go wrong.

As I closed my laptop for the night, I couldn’t help but think about how much has changed since the days of just writing code. But even with all these new responsibilities, the core of what we do—building reliable systems that solve real problems for our users—remains the same. And that’s something to be grateful for.

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That’s a wrap on my first full day as a manager in tech. Here’s to hoping I get better at this over time!