Title: November 12, 2007 - A Day in the Life of a New Engineer Manager

November 12, 2007 was just another day for me, but it felt like the start of something significant. I had only been in my role as an engineering manager for about two months, and already I was feeling the weight of responsibility. Today, I sat at my desk with a cup of coffee, trying to clear my head before facing the team meeting.

The Morning

I started the day by checking our internal tool that tracks project status. It’s still one of those homegrown scripts, but it gets the job done for now. Seeing the green and red bars indicating progress was comforting. However, there were a few critical bugs that needed to be fixed. One of them was affecting our release schedule; I quickly decided to jump into the codebase.

The code was messy, as usual. It’s been like this since day one: a hodgepodge of features and patches thrown together without much thought for maintainability. But that’s how we got here—fast. Now, it’s time to clean things up, or at least make them less prone to breaking.

The Codebase

I spent the next few hours diving into the code. I made a list of todos: refactor this function, add some tests, and document these parts. It’s easy to get sucked in when you have deadlines looming, but I tried my best to stay focused on what would benefit us long-term.

Just as I was about to commit my changes, my phone buzzed with an alert from PagerDuty. Our staging environment had crashed again! I rolled my eyes and sighed. This has been a recurring issue for months now—some kind of race condition in our deployment scripts. I decided to take this as an opportunity to teach myself more about distributed systems.

The Team Meeting

The team meeting was scheduled after lunch, but before we got there, I had another chat with one of the developers. She’s new, and a bit overwhelmed by the pace of things. We talked about her progress on the current project and how she felt. It’s amazing what a good conversation can do—just talking to someone often lightens their load.

During the meeting, we went over our priorities for the next sprint. The team was eager to get started, but there were some hesitations. One developer brought up a point about adding more logging and monitoring before making significant changes. I nodded thoughtfully; it’s always a delicate balance between moving fast and being prepared.

The Future

As the day wore on, I found myself reflecting on where we’ve been and where we’re headed. GitHub had just launched, but it seemed like everyone was still figuring out what to do with it. AWS EC2/S3 were becoming more mainstream, but the cloud vs. colo debates raged on. I couldn’t help but think about how all these tools would change our lives over time.

I left work feeling a mix of pride and frustration. Pride in having helped build something from scratch, even if it wasn’t perfect; frustration that we still had so much to do. But hey, that’s the nature of being an engineer: always learning, always improving.

As I packed up my things for the day, I looked at the wall where we had our old photo of the team. We’ve come a long way, but there’s always more to achieve. November 12, 2007—just another day in the life of a new engineering manager trying to make it all work.

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